

How long would the Mailbox app line be in real-life? - waxpancake
http://waxy.org/2013/02/how_long_is_the_mailbox_line/

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mrich
Can someone clue me in on this - people are now standing in line for software?
The only logical two reasons I can think of:

1) Their backend doesn't scale well enough

2) Artifical scarcity to make people think they are missing out on something

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rgbrenner
and 3) it's displayed 4th in the itunes store when you search for mail, and is
the first generic mail app displayed in the results. Look at these results:

1) Gmail 2) mail.com 3) Yahoo mail 4) mailbox 5) Windows Live Hotmail 6) Voice
Changer Plus 7) Emoji and Unicode Icons 8) Dragon Dictation 9) Ink Cards
Personalized 10) A+ Emotion Icons ... Continues with more completely-
unrelated-to-mail results.

If I was searching for a mail client, then mailbox would be it apparently.

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elithrar
> If I was searching for a mail client, then mailbox would be it apparently.

FWIW, the reviews on the AU App Store are very mixed - 82 5-star, 20 4-star,
11 3-star, 2 2-star and 58 1-star.

Many of the 1-star reviews are complaining about how this (free) app has a
waiting line.

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eddieroger
I've been waiting for two weeks, and I've finally broken 50,000. I don't know
if I even want to use this app anymore.

Their rationale makes sense - it is better to make people wait than everyone
have a crappy experience, but given how easy infrastructure is to come by
these days and how quickly one can provision it, I'm worried they're taking
too long and people will forget or uninstall the app. That said, when it
finally lets me in, this could change my life and I may not even know it. But
at this rate, I definitely won't.

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jacquesc
It's sort of a strange thing. An app like this should have the easiest
horizontally scalable backend ever. Each user has no overlap whatsoever with
other users (unlike more complex sharded instances like ebay, facebook, and
every other social app).

So it must be more of a business decision about whether it's worth the cost of
firing up all those new servers for a currently free app.

Makes me think they should have just charged for it out of the gate, then
they'd have the financial incentive to actually fire up all those servers. Or
a "subscribe now" to get to the front of the line.

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gibbonsd1
It might not be quite that simple. There could be limitations on whatever
database they are using and the way they set it up as well.

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MatthewPhillips
Remember when email used to be a standard? Yeah, those were the days. All you
had to do to get your email on any device was download a client, give it your
credentials and bam! All your emails. Nowadays we have email clients that only
work with specific hosts, email clients that require you share your
credentials with their servers so they can poll that one specific host,
because apparently it's not possible to write an email client on some OSes. Oh
the times.

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mslathrop
I'm curious as to whether or not this kind of thing will spring up more and
more in other apps.

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nwh
They'll might have worked out a way of making money with the app by the time
the author gets to see his inbox. I won't hold my breath though.

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smiddereens
If you're impatient you can skip the line with proxy shenanigans.

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ceslami
what?

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huhsamovar
The author of that blog post linearly extrapolated his wait time. Instead of
whining, perhaps they should read what's actually happening here:
[http://www.mailboxapp.com/reservations/?p=1#how-were-
rolling...](http://www.mailboxapp.com/reservations/?p=1#how-were-rolling-out-
mailbox)

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huhsamovar
Oh, and that app they're waiting for? Yeah, it's free.

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smackfu
Free*

* business plan to be revealed later.

