

Why aren’t App Constellations working? - bhaile
http://andrewchen.co/why-arent-app-constellations-working-guest-post/

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pjc50
Antipattern: when scrolling down the page, at some point it has a popup asking
for your email address.

Having read the article, it doesn't mention that unbundling is a cost to the
user (more real estate, more task switching). People put up with it for
Facebook because it's so widely used already.

If you're not unbundling features but instead launching a new feature as a new
app, then you have the same problem of trying to achieve popularity takeoff as
everyone else.

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nekopa
Regarding the anti pattern: seems more like a dumb pattern. I often sign up
for new sites when they have good content. But I need to read the content
_first_.

So many people give the pop up and interrupt me in the first paragraph so it
is an automatic dismissal. The smart sites do it at the end. If I like the
writing, I may sign up. Smarter sites just give a link at the end.

But the best sites just write great, compelling articles that make me want to
hunt down a subscribe button.

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tempodox
Sending data back & forth between web or desktop apps is so much easier than
with “mobile apps”. Even on the same device, apps are just too isolated. The
platform vendors do everything to disrupt what makes collaboration work
elsewhere. They need to destroy the round wheel so they can sell you a
trilateral crap version of it for N times the price.

~~~
mattschmulen
consolidation and fragmentation tension is the weapon of choice in mobile

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netcan
This is actually an interesting question.

In a lot of these examples, "app constellation" means everything the website
does is too complicated so it needs to be broken down into several different
apps. It's possible that this is just a bad question.

Apps originally designed for mobile don't have problems that you would
consider solving with an "app constellation." They just don't have more
features than comfortably fit into a mobile app. Tinder vs OKcupid.
Twitter/Whatsapp vs Facebook. Skype vs Whatsapp.

I mean, the mobile only (or first) essentially solve the same "problems."

So Facebook needs to solve some hard, ugly problems that will probably never
have a tidy resolution while whatsapp doesn't. No wonder they bought them.
It's hard to move to less complexity. Just to give one example. FB (or
Google+) need to give their users complicated privacy controls to decide who
sees what. Twitter or Whatsapp don't, most of it is implicit.

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tsunamifury
Provably false with the extreme example: Google.

Gmail, Maps, Hangouts, Search and a few others are regularly in the top 100,
if not top 20 apps in the iOS app store. Thats at least 5 apps that stay on
top. Several games are able to d the same for short durations of time as
well... like the derivatives of Angry Birds and a few others.

The constellation works with a series of self established services. It only
works as a spin off of the spin off is actually BIGGER than the core app, i.e.
FB messenger. Otherwise you should just be looking to kill off the features
you were looking to spin off.

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mattschmulen
As apps grow, and features increase there is always a pressure towards a "mega
app” of many features and an opportunity for the "micro app” of focused
features. The old adage of “Desktop apps are novels and Mobile apps are
proverbs” may not hold as mobile matures, there is nuance.

Mobile applications are especially sensitive to this pressure of feature
growth since the users are often interacting in short “mobile minute” spurts
of need at a specific time and location ( of course not in all cases, youtube
iPad engagement is much longer). The juxtaposition of large apps that support
the desired feature and a small app that just does the one desired feature is
where larger app stakeholders are trying to hold user base by providing the
best of both words by splitting up apps and creating app ecosystems
“constellations”.

Some things that are not discussed in this article that discounts the current
state of mobile apps is the new integration/federation capabilities provided
by mobile platforms such as deep-linking, custom actions and widgets.

Another interesting situation is how a “north star” or “keystone” app may fit
into this by providing the highly valued "single sign on” authentication
feature for an app ecosystem. I despise login screens and passwords fields in
mobile and its Im happy to install a second app so long as you federate
authentication.

Maybe in the end one app makes a product but two make a platform ( or maybe
just skip the ‘app’ all together and make an API )

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pmontra
It kind of works with google docs since they extracted the editors/viewers for
the different file types into different apps. But there is no choice, either
you have the spreadsheet app or you can't see the spreadsheet. That doesn't
get against the expectations of users trained to use Word, Excel, Powerpoint,
etc for different files. However having an app for the front page of HN and a
different one to read and write comments would be weird. I guess somebody
won't install it.

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omouse
Define "working". Maintaining #1 in download ranks is a very rough measure and
without correlation to something else I wouldn't place a huge value on it. A
million people download and then remove it. What then? I'd be more interested
in the CLV.

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aetherson
Could I make a case for "app constellations were always a kind of dumb idea"?

For the most part, they're a solution in search of a problem. A designer
wanted to make a really clean interface, and in service of making a really
clean interface, they killed the genuine synergy of a multi-functional app.

The only case where app constellations really make sense is where the original
app was really, genuinely, for-real several apps in one already, with no
significant crossover. Even then, unless your customer base are either:

a. Already naturally segmented into people who use functionality X exclusively
and those who use functionality Y exclusively.

or

b. Really heavy users of both X and Y such that they'll "pay" the cost of
downloading both apps separately.

then it still doesn't make much sense. If you have a function in your main app
that people, like, kind of use every now and again, then if you separate it
out into a different app, they'll just go without that functionality.

