A look at apps with waiting lists
The way we look at new app launches is changing thanks to the cloud. Rather than a full-scale launch that invites everyone to download and try an app, developers are rolling out their apps slowly, opting for a waiting list that meters access to a service. Several high profile apps recently used this new wait list paradigm and The Verge chatted with them about their experience.
The conversation focuses on the challenges of storing data remotely and dealing with the unexpected outliers who push a service beyond its tested limits. "Two hundred and fifty [beta testers] is a decent data set, but when you increase that several orders of magnitude you find edge cases," said Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood. Underwood notes that Mailbox was not prepared for that one user who tried to transfer 40,000 messages into the service on launch day and caused the Mailbox servers to almost buckle under the load.
You can read additional commentary from Loom CEO Jan Senderek and Jonathan Benassaya, CEO of Stream Nation in The Verge article.
