Therein lies the difficulty in making an app with the intention of having it be simple – can you keep that up indefinitely? Say you want to make a simple, elegantly designed photo editing app. However, a word processing application can’t remain the same for even a year or two without people complaining and wanting updates and new features and more functionality. Something like a stapler can pretty much remain in its original form for decades. However, the rapid pace of technology seems to push apps extremely quickly in this direction. In some ways it’s just the natural order of the universe, that things will always evolve over time and become more complicated. Do they keep their app simple or do they start slowly adding those features in?ĬMD+Space “87: Developing a Podcast App, with Russell Ivanovic” 1:03:00įor years I’ve noticed that most applications slowly evolve from simple to complex. It’s interesting to see what those guys do with that then. But I mean on the flip side of that is I see a lot of those apps that launch and people are like “I love his app, it’s so awesome, so simple.” And then they’ll request every single feature that they have in Downcast or Pocket Casts or Instacast or whatever podcasting app they use. Once you have a customer base and once you’re supporting all of them and once they come to love all the different features that you have, it’s never easy to try and pare that stuff back. But the benefit they have is they can come into the market and they can say – here’s something super simple, way simpler than Pocket Casts, and so much easier to understand, and not many features and nothing to get sort of tripped over by. But more that a lot of the ideas these guys are having are ideas we’ve had originally, and we’ve kind of refined those ideas and changed them over time. I’m not saying they copied us, I don’t think they would have ever seen those versions of Pocket Casts. In fact there’s an app that came out recently, Castro, and the way that app is laid out, obviously not the way it looks, but the way it’s laid out is very, very similar to version 1 or version 2 of Pocket Casts, even down to the podcast and episode toggle thing at the top. I think the downside though of us kind of being one of the bigger players is that a lot of these new apps that are coming out, their selling point is that they’re super simple. On a recent episode of CMD+Space, Russell Ivanovic, one of the creators of Pocket Casts, discussed the competition that has grown around his app:

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