Usability Hell

The new Path iOS app seems to have got almost universal acclaim - and it is a nicely designed iOS app. Hats off to anyone with the guts to try a social network at this point.

However, they’ve made several major strategic mistakes….

iOS Only Approach = Insanity

If they had developed a responsive website (1 website that adapts to different devices/resolutions) instead of iOS app, they would have had all these benefits, much quicker:

Runs Everywhere

A responsive website runs on any device, desktop, tablet, phone. The above page is what I get when I click on a path email notification. Seriously.

iOS has maybe ~200m users? The web has ~2billion (including all iOS devices).

Even among people with an iOS device (including me) - why if I’m sat in front of my computer would i want to use my phone to access Path? (hint, I wouldn’t).

More work for way less product.

[Edit they now have Android app - but everything in post remains true]

Speed of Development & Deployment - UnLean

Build, Measure, Learn. The lean startup mantra we’re all aiming to implement at our startups is heavily disrupted by iOS. Not only by being harder, slower & more expensive to develop, but the app store is a huge road block slowing that learning process to a crawl. Deployment takes days and weeks, forget continuous deployment.

Even if there were no app store approval process, updates require users to download every update. Even if that process were automatic, which it isn’t, the bandwidth required to download multiple code changes per day would be horrendous for users & for the startup. You also have the nightmare of many (even thousands) of software versions out there to support.

So Path learn & iterate way more slowly. The biggest advantage of a startup is agility and rapid ability to iterate; iOS kills this. You get some competition who isn’t hamstrung in this way & you’re screwed.

You are also at risk of being rejected by the app store approval process at any time. This alone puts the fate of your business in Apple’s hand & is a constant threat.

If path were web only from the start they would be several years ahead of where they are today.

Cost

To just reach Android, iOS & desktop web - is 3x the work, 3x the code base & at least 3 times the cost.

Add in Blackberry & Windows Phone and its 5x. Who knows what devices we’ll be using in a few years.

You then have multiple incompatible platforms to manage, with multiple dev teams. $2.5m of venture funding only buys you an iOS app after all this time. Thats a lot of effort for a single platform.

Instead of duplicating the exact same functionality across 2/3/4 platforms - Path could be moving forward & learning 2/3/4 times faster. Or running 2/3/4 times more efficiently.

Ease of Development

HTML & CSS are universal standards. The browser is the ultimate, ultra fast platform for running apps now. It’s the dream Java never lived up to. Web skills are everywhere.

Trading these in for esoteric development languages, in uber high demand, with very few truly world class coders, puts you at a huge disadvantage.

It is also a lot of work to optimise iOS & get the most out of it (I’m not an expert in iOS development but this is what I hear, for example in the recent Kevin Rose interview on This Week in Startups). Way more best practice & help exists with the web, along with frameworks & libraries like JQuery & JQuery mobile.

Disadvantages of web

Hardware integration - you can do most things through the web you can do natively now, eg location. You could recreate path in HTML fairly easily (certainly the important bits).

App Store - it’s nice to be in the app store - but not worth all this pain.

By developing on iOS you’re trading, perhaps, 1 or 2 cosmetic ‘nice to have’ things most people barely notice - for fundamental, business threatening, viability threatening disadvantages.

Limiting Friends

Path users are limited to 150 friends.

There are 2 tangled issues here.

1. Limiting friends for ‘intimacy’

2. Being a more trusted platform (vis a vis privacy) than Facebook.

Focusing on privacy from the beginning, and building trust can make Path the trusted alternative to Facebook.

Having a limit on friends has nothing to do with privacy & trust. This arbitrary limit is just an inconvenience for users - what is the benefit to them?

Many people would hit the 150 limit then spend lots of time they don’t have figuring out who to unfriend. There’s nothing stopping people self-imposing this limit.

The ONLY use case I’ve heard for a small, ultra private/limited social network is ‘to share kiddy photos’. That takes you from 2bn+ potential users to a few million - and maybe guarantees you niche obscurity. Why not just call it ‘kids photo net’ and be more honest - it’s a tiny niche market.

Even that is a red herring. A platform that people trust, which allowed more private areas for an inner circle, is the issue here. The 150 limit is irrelevant.

You’re also killing the network effect. A good % of people, maybe most, maybe almost all, don’t want a friend limits. So many will never join path - which will do a great job of stopping it hitting a tipping point (along with iOS only).

It’s like they’ve set it up to fail deliberately.

Business Model

For a social network to make good money, like Facebook, you need huge, long term penetration. Path won’t get this while it has the above problems.

In it’s current form generating solid profits seems a very long way off.

Summary

To get some debatable ‘better device integration’ - in exchange for business threatening disadvantages is crazy.

How Path can beat Facebook

Path may say they aren’t trying to beat Facebook. The problem is Facebook is their only real competitor, they are fighting them whether they want to or not.

Their biggest barrier currently is themselves, they have their foot on the accelerator and the hand break on.

Here’s how they win…

1. Abandon iOS, go fully responsive web
Cheaper, future proof, unlimited iteration, runs on *everything* right now. Do way more with way less.

2. Remove 150 limit
A lot of people are looking for an alternative to Facebook. There isn’t one (Google+ is way different). Path could be it. It could change the world. Most people don’t want a 150 limit.