Ahh, sorry about that poor experience! And thanks for sharing the domains - will pass this along. If you get stuck in the auth loop again, our support team is very responsive.
1. Account switching and/or being able to merge accounts is a totally reasonable idea. Right now you can theoretically sign out / sign in with a different email address but I know that's a pain
2. Good feedback re: the orange dot! I'll pass that along to our Designer.
3. This is also a good idea, but unfortunately a little less straightforward to get right 100% of the time as email clients increasingly start to get in the way of tracking pixels visibility.
> after commenting on one newsletter, it becomes impossible to comment on any other newsletter without compromising my privacy.
We tried to build reader profiles in a way that can handle this nicely - you can choose on a per-subscription basis which publications to display on your profile and which you'd like to keep hidden. This is almost like an anonymous subscription although it doesn't quite support a fully anonymous commenting use case, since theoretically someone could recognize you from different comment sections.
One thing I could see us trying in the future is giving writers more control over who can comment and how, on their particular publications. Already, writers can choose whether to allow comments from all subscribers, only paid subscribers, or to turn off comments entirely. Allowing writers to choose to support anonymous commenting doesn't seem out of the question.
Thanks for the response. Your example of someone recognizing you from different comment sections is exactly the thing that concerns me.
I do think giving writers the choice to enable anonymous commenting would help to improve things, although it's a little bit closing the barn door after the horse bolted, since we can't go back and anonymize comments that we already made. If allowing different pseudonyms (including avatar) for different newsletters isn't on the cards, I think the idea mentioned elsewhere of allowing the app to compile multiple logins into a single client-side feed could make the existing workaround of creating multiple accounts a bit less painful.
Either way, despite my frustrations with the identity behavior, I do appreciate the platform you have built, and how it seems to have revitalized the blogosphere. I also very much like the focus on email, since it allows me to read whenever I want instead of just when my device is online. So thanks for helping shift the culture of online writing in this way.
- The iPad experience is admittedly not as amazing as it could be, and something I'm excited to improve big time down the road. For now, the app should respect your dynamic type settings (in case you have your font set larger at the iOS level)
- Yep, there's a toggle you can access from your Profile Tab > Notifications
- Right now the offline experience is so-so but not perfectly optimized. If you refresh your Inbox right before a flight your recent posts should be cached nicely and readable while offline.
Definitely. The current Discover tab in the app is admittedly pretty basic - just search, the same featured publications from the homepage on substack.com, and categories. We have a lot of ideas for how to improve this tab, as well as other discover mechanisms throughout the app.
One area I'm especially excited about: discovery through the lens of the writers you trust. What are those writers reading themselves? What else are their readers (whose taste you ostensibly share) reading? We have a light version of this already with reader profiles in the app (and on web) - when you subscribe to a publication, you can choose whether to display it on your profile. Lots more we could do though.
Discoverability based on more specific categories, like "humor/comedy" "movies" "advice" would be more helpful than trying to triangulate between what a writer/author reads and what a new reader is reading. Writers who are more open-minded subscribe to newsletters that have nothing to do with the content they write about. If a reader is interested in more "humor" writing, for example, it doesn't make any sense to suggest a travel newsletter simply because the author of the article they are looking at reads it, and you are deeming it higher quality because of that when it may not really be better than other newsletters in the same category but rather a reflection of a personal relationship the author has with another author. To a lesser extent the same goes for the readers of a publication. People have eclectic tastes and are not monolithic. But as a reader if I'm enjoying an article under the category "movies" then I would appreciate seeing articles that are tagged with related terms like "film" "cinema" "movie recommendations" "movie reviews." The lack of tagging or more nuance in the categories Substack offers really limits discoverability.
> As a user I don't mind an app from a technical perspective. It gives me more options! But what are the things the app can do that the web cannot?
A simple but important one: being able to get a notification on your phone when a new post lands in your inbox. There are lots of subtle little things around readability, scroll performance, etc. too. There are also a decent number of Podcasts on Substack now, and listening in a web player (on mobile) is a pretty sub-par experience.
App notifications are not a feature but a detrimental annoyance.
Also useless, because it is very likely you cannot read the article at the moment you receive the notification, because you are busy.
I don't know what Substack is, but it seems similar to Medium, and as such an app is unnecessary. You don't need apps to display and read text, I already have a web browser. Distraction-free reading? Just make sure your pages are compatible with Reader View, or better yet, make a distraction free design in the first place.
Can you elaborate on what “scroll performance” means? The only time I’ve had trouble with scrolling when I’m reading something on my phone is when an app or website thinks they know how to scroll better than the OS does.
I'm not sure how they meant it in this particular context but IMO good scroll performance with a lot of media on the page can be quite tricky to do on the web and a bit easier on iOS. This might be better these days than it was when I last did web dev (3+ years ago).
I turn off gmail notifications. I suppose some of their readers might want to know when the Substacks they subscribe to have new content but don't want to know when they're getting new spam.
It's definitely not optimal, I'll be the first to admit. With limited resources, it really comes down to sequencing. We could have sat on the iPhone app until the Android app was ready to launch, but shipping on one platform ASAP allows us to start learning what's working / what's not working and ultimately improve the product that goes out the door on day 1 on Android.
In the iOS app, we don't support in-app-purchases (subscribers can upgrade to paid via email/web) so there's no 30% take from Apple.
Is that even allowed by Apple to collect subscriptions outside of the App Store? There have been many battles about it and Fortnite or some paid email services are at odds with Apple.
Regarding a cross-platform launch, I think launching at the same time considerable increases odds of reaching a critical mass of people joining the hype generated by a launch. In my experience users rarely come back to a place when app was released to a platform they don't have - disappointment factor plays a role - unless they really need it.
