
Koji – App Development Platform - cardamomo
https://withkoji.com/
======
superhu6
Watched a talk that the CEO gave, and he describes it by analogy to YouTube.
(he was formerly at Google, CTO of MySpace, and founder of Veoh (an early
YouTube competitor).

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitry-
shapiro-a2b1/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitry-shapiro-a2b1/)

Before YouTube, it was difficult and expensive to broadcast video. YouTube
made it effortless, and therefore a bunch of people showed up and created all
kinds of things... Some are stupid and weird, others are very lucrative for
the creators.

He says that Koji wants to do the same thing for code/apps/interactive
content.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q22bQuiY874](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q22bQuiY874)

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sthielen
Hi everyone, co-founder/lead dev here. We've been working on Koji for the past
six months or so, inspired by the idea of democratizing the creation of
interactive content (apps, "mini programs", whatever you want to call them) in
the same way that YouTube democratized the creation of interactive video. --
we're still in beta and there are lots of rough edges, but it's nonetheless
exciting to wake up and see it on here :)

Happy to answer any questions!

PS - My cofounder ([https://twitter.com/dmitry](https://twitter.com/dmitry))
and I met five years ago here on HN!

~~~
DeepYogurt
Your site is completely un-usable with umatrix on default settings. This isn't
a complaint and I expect things to break with umatrix, but I thought you
should know.

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norswap
I would have dismissed something like this in the past — it seems to be just
template + community. But now I undertand that the social context matters a
great deal, so it seems interesting!

How does it compare to Glitch, which seems to be trying to achieving the same
thing, however? And ObservableHQ? (though the focus seems different there)

~~~
sthielen
Thanks! And yeah, I think the timing really feels right for something like
this in a way that wasn't the case even a year or so ago.

In addition to the published apps on the discovery side of the platform, we've
made a significant investment in tech that enables creators/makers to develop
and remix apps in a new way (including spinning up "remote localhost"
containers for development; building a collaborative online editor with a
unique editing experience that lifts no-code visual abstractions from the
underlying code; integrated deploy/CI for both frontends and backends; and
other goodies like support for custom domains with automatic HTTPS). This
video shows some of that in action [0].

[0] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5uoqPFInlY&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5uoqPFInlY&feature=youtu.be&t=89)

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JMTQp8lwXL
From the vision document:

> This fundamentally changes the equations that drive the app economy, turning
> it from one where a few players build monolithic services that chase
> billions of DAUs, to a creator economy where everyone is empowered to use
> tech to solve their own problems and express themselves creatively.

I question this premise. The internet of today != the internet of 20 years
ago. Traffic is primarily driven by progressively fewer and fewer sites.

The problem of an app "surviving" today isn't about the cost of app
development. It's blitzscaling. You need light billions of dollars on fire to
maintain your position as an Uber. No SWE can quit their FANG job and make
that happen anymore, with their own money. They'll need VC Money.

Also, the average user downloads 0 new apps per month. I know I'm definitely
the average user. Because all the apps are competing for my attention and send
garbage push notifications, I turn off push notifications. As a user, I want
less apps, not more.

~~~
rhapsodyv
A lot of business have your niche or micro localization. It don't become a
unicorn, but can make money sufficiently to be a life style business. As some
saas are like grocery store.

Maybe the author is talking about this type of "local/nich tech business"...
No?

~~~
superhu6
Watched a talk that the CEO gave, and he describes it by analogy to YouTube.

Before YouTube, it was difficult and expensive to broadcast video. YouTube
made it effortless, and therefore a bunch of people showed up and created all
kinds of things... Some are stupid and weird, others are very lucrative for
the creators.

He says that Koji wants to do the same thing for code/apps/interactive
content.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q22bQuiY874](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q22bQuiY874)

------
ibotty
And i was thinking about [fedora's
koji]([https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/](https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/)),
which is not that far off.

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superhu6
This feels like people are starting out with simple apps (kind of like YouTube
started with stupid pet tricks), and will be interesting to see if they start
to get better at it.

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startupdiscuss
This looks great so far. Eager to hear from all the people who are going to
point out the other platforms that are similar so I can learn about them too.

~~~
tarr11
Glitch, Scratch, Tynker

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kapdidas88
reminds me a lot of glitch, except the apps you can remix on koji are more
‘fully baked’ .. also cool that it has everything from full code access to no-
code tools

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badkoji
Fake job listings to get developers to add to their templates collection is
common practice for them. Terrible company.

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perk
Hm, I couldn't find where to start a new project from scratch.

~~~
superhu6
[https://withkoji.com/create](https://withkoji.com/create)

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NikkiA
Only the js community could be so self-centered to assume that everyone will
just assume which language is being used for their platform....

Yep, it's js.

~~~
dang
Can you please not take HN threads into programming language flamewars? Or any
flamewars. We're trying for a bit better than that here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

