
Craigslist releases new mobile app for iOS and Android - pkamb
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/craigslist/id1336642410
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greggman2
I'm not sure this is a direct competitor or not but just to pass on info to
HNers, here in Japan Mercari is #1 for buying and selling used stuff online.

It's mobile 1st. Take a picture of the item you want to sell, add a price and
it's on sale. They've done nearly everything possible to make things as
seamless as possible. When a sale happens you get notified where and how to
ship it. They partnered with the post office and the 50k+ convenience stores
so you can ship from the stores. At both locations they auto print labels via
QR codes and offer fixed box sizes. I think they do a little bit of escrow
(not 100% sure the actual mechanics) but I believe the buyer pays immediately
but the funds are not forwarded until the buyer approves the item. (really not
sure about this part)

Certain things seem like it might only fit Japan. The convenience store
partnership is huge since, at least in populous areas there is always multiple
within 2-5 min walk. Even post offices are relatively many. I also don't know
to what extent a more trustworthy populus helps.

They are hiring like crazy and hiring foreigners as well if you want a job in
Japan. They're probably the #1 company for running dev meetups in Tokyo and
those meetups feel like SV, all English, in rooms that might as well be at
Google Mountain View including food and kitchens etc..

AFAIK they've had no luck replicating their success outside Japan

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siquick
In Australia where I live, selling goods online outside the likes of eBay and
normal ecommerce has become a generally painful experience.

Facebook marketplace (and Gumtree to a lesser degree) have given the buyer
this weird desire to lowball on pricing to the point of insult. It's almost
like as soon as people open Facebook, they become this extreme version of
themselves, and this extends to "haggling".

~~~
whtrbt
Definitely a lot of tyre kickers. Every time I've marked something I'm selling
as e.g. '$500 negotiable' I get tons of messages saying "what's your best
price" or "what's your lowest offer?"

That's not how haggling works. My lowest offer is $500 until I hear yours.

Aside from that, I've had good experiences selling old video game consoles on
Gumtree.

~~~
cerberusss
Sometimes I do this when I don't want to haggle; I just want a price on which
I can decide a simple go/no-go.

~~~
moftz
I would always mark up my prices for things on forums a little bit so I had
room to haggle it down but I never entertained people asking what my lowest
price was. If you can't afford sticker price, you can afford to haggle. It was
a pretty niche marketplace so there was pretty much never going to be anything
like those crazy thrift store finds where someone buys something worth $5000
for $5, all the sellers usually had a good idea what their stuff was worth and
priced appropriately. There were always the morons who priced their junk 5x
it's market value but those people were too stupid to haggle with, they would
get insulted when you offered a good market price.

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spqr0a1
Have yet to use the mobile apps, but kudos to the Craigslist team for making
their website one of the best mobile experiences out there. Loads quickly,
easy to navigate, and isn't missing features compared to desktop. Certainly
doesn't have the look we expect from a modern website but there's a level of
usability we can all aspire to.

~~~
zelly
I find craigslist's fast loading pages to be problematic.

I think their website would be improved by rewriting it entirely in
JavaScript, transpiling the JavaScript to JavaScript, requiring the JavaScript
to render, re-implementing the entire UI in JavaScript including hyperlinks,
then running JavaScript on the server to generate HTML, sending the HTML to
the browser, also sending the JavaScript bundle with megabytes of hipster
fonts and random people's github repos to insert spaces in a string and stuff,
then finally re-rendering the client's page after the multi-megabyte
JavaScript bundle finishes downloading.

Now _that_ is the nice modern user experience I have come to demand as a user
in 2019.

~~~
ng12
If a site feels unusable like this it's because you're the not the user. News
sites, for example, are SPAs because they want to sell you ads. It has nothing
to do with the technology and everything to do with the business using it.

~~~
tiborsaas
How are SPA-s and displaying ads related? The reload / page model benefits
news sites more since they can generate more pageviews and hence ad reloads.
There really is no connections. Devs implement SPA-s because they think it's
better user experience (yes, it's hard to get it right).

~~~
organsnyder
I doubt anyone relying on ad revenue to run a business equates pageviews with
HTTP requests to the server anymore.

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xenihn
For anyone who hasn't used Craigslist in years due to FB groups/Marketplace,
OfferUp, and others: IMO it's only improved since the rise of competitors. I
did lots of buying and selling on Craigslist as a college student, then
stopped using it for years until recently.

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dclusin
I paid $5 to post a used truck for sale ad on craigslist. The only responses I
got was from scammers. I posted for free on facebook market place with copy
pasta text + pictures. 10+ inquiries and sold it in 2 days for my asking
price. craigslist is going down the tubes and they are just cynically
capitalizing on every bit of revenue they can before it fades into obscurity.

~~~
52-6F-62
Except you need a FB account. Craiglist isn't going to track you all over the
web and include your sales and purchases in your advertising and whatever
other profiles.

There's a lot of funny business on any public want-ad board. I appreciate one
that doesn't want to know the intimate details of my life for their financial
benefit. I have to laugh at calling Craigslist the cynical ones in this
case...

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joshfraser
I love how their product screenshots show a 2 BR Victorian in San Francisco
for $2,000 / month. At least they're honest about how many scammy fake
listings are on their site.

~~~
pentae
A classic case of your designers placeholder finding its way past final review

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commoner
Google Play Store link for Android app:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.craigslist...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.craigslist.CraigslistMobile)

The Android app requires you to sign in with a Google account, which is
disappointing in terms of privacy.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Wow the reviews are night and day between Google and iOS.

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jcomis
They require access to your google account to sign in which is clearly not
needed. Most people HATE this, myself included.

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mehrdada
Craigslist has held on to its market share quite strongly for a long time, but
more recently it has clearly started to weaken with Facebook Marketplace and a
plethora of more special-purpose apps that are much more mobile-centric. I'm
glad they are finally starting to defend their share. I'll be curious to
watch: time will tell if they were too late in transitioning to mobile or will
it be just fine for them.

~~~
goosehonk
I find that Nextdoor gets me more responses on for-sale items and none of them
are scams. On Craigslist I get fewer and the majority are scams. I only bother
with Craigslist these days when I’m looking to buy, or if I’m selling an item
expensive enough to worry about getting the best price.

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bluedino
Does anyone use CL anymore? It's basically all spam (Keyword dumpers that CL
doesn't care about apparently) anytime I search for anything, and I used to be
able to sell a laptop on there in 1-3 days. Now I can go weeks without getting
a legitimate response.

So much spam on the other end of it as well.

~~~
jumbopapa
I use it and it works fairly well. I wish they wouldn't allow on actual stores
and spammers.

I recently graduated and moved to a larger city than my college town and I've
found that Craigslist is actually worse in the larger city. Less people who
respond overall and there's always someone who responds 45 minutes across the
city.

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kennywinker
You can filter the stores out using “by owner” instead of “by dealer”. Some
spammers will have their listings as by owner but... it gets rid of most of
them

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pryelluw
I used to work at the company (Mokriya) that had previously released an
"official" CL app. CL's attitude towards apps was funny. I never got it. The
lead dev told me they were hard to work with and were against providing APIs.
No wonder they got their lunch eaten by facebook and other marketplaces.

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etxm
Traded a Hank Williams CD for an old canoe once. Looking forward to the
future, CL.

~~~
philshem
Your comment captures the essence of Craigslist of yore.

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Exuma
I was hoping the font was times new roman. Still, great they kept it plain
looking.

~~~
saagarjha
Looks like the default San Francisco on iOS.

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rdtwo
It’s crazy that searches for craigslist in the App Store does not actually
show the official app anywhere

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eugeniub
When a new iOS app is released usually it takes at least a day to appear in
App Store search results. (Source: am iOS developer)

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egdod
The website works just fine on mobile. Why in the world would I download
another app?

~~~
goosehonk
Perhaps the app can manage to remember your address and phone number, instead
of making you type it in every time even when you are logged in to your
account? I dunno just guessing at some improvements they can make.

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beeskneecaps
Love the category menu. Everything still looks like a scam, but now it looks
less scammy.

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ksec
Forgive my ignorance, ( Not from US ) how does Craiglist make money?

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JeremyNT
Listing some sorts of items costs money. I recently sold a used car and had to
pay them a small fee.

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creeble
Really? I was unaware of this change, haven't sold a car in a while (but have
sold several on CL in the past).

I guess the spam level got too intense, which I can definitely vouch for. Lots
of not-believable deals that were basically phishing scams.

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Camillo
Is Craigslist still the way to go for finding a place to rent in the Bay Area?
As far as I recall, it was a pretty poor experience, but it was the only place
that had the listings.

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Austin_Conlon
What's the link to download it on the Play Store?

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pkamb
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.craigslist...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.craigslist.CraigslistMobile)

(found both these apps via a banner on the mobile website, btw. No press
releases that I've seen.)

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qubex
I’m on the Italian App Store and I just get a “not available in your location”
error, which is somewhat galling.

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cryptozeus
I recently moved and tried selling stuff on craigslist. The amount of spam and
shady emails I got was overwhelming. They never figured out how to control
that.

~~~
dredmorbius
On the buy side, it's also getting tots redic.

I've mostly monitored furniture classifications. The "by dealer" sections are
all but unusable, with repeat and keyword-stuffed listings. This has been
going on for at least a decade. It's bad enough that I don't bother.

The individual sales listings are much more viable.

IMO: Craigslist should start charging for business listings, at least in
regions for which spamming is prevalent.

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jhatemyjob
Has Craigslist ever taken investment? It always smelled like a purely
bootstrapped company to me...

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ec109685
One of the original owners sold a stake:
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/craigslist/investors...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/craigslist/investors/investors_list)

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ctingom
Wow so Craigslist launched a iPhone app — like 5 years too late.

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The_rationalist
Ionic or native?

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s09dfhks
Have to sign in just to save a search?

no thanks

~~~
dredmorbius
Use RSS feeds:

[http://septicscompanion.com/blog/2013/12/how-to-monitor-
lots...](http://septicscompanion.com/blog/2013/12/how-to-monitor-lots-of-
craigslist-sites-at-once/)

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Despegar
Mobile computing has finally arrived

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crooked-v
It really says something about the iOS App Store that I literally put in
"craigslist" as a search term and this app doesn't appear at all in the
results.

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dublidu
Better late than never I guess. It's pretty sad how little Craigslist has done
to keep up with the times.

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ds
If I had equity in craigslist as a employee or investor I would be furious.

Think about how much value has been lost to offerup & letgo because they
literally took over a decade to release a official mobile app. There is no
excuse besides incompetence and gross negligence.

There should unironically be employee lawsuits at the management.

