A Brief History of Mobile at Buffer and What’s Next: Transforming Buffer into a Mobile First Company

Buffer has always been a web-first service, starting in 2010 with Joel’s first version. Even today we don’t have a responsive version of the web app. While we build and maintain native Android and iOS apps, in the past the mobile side of Buffer has generally been about establishing feature parity with its web-based counterpart and less about driving new features or products.

And this made sense given the nature of Buffer’s services: While social content is largely consumed on mobile, large-scale content generation and administration is still well-suited for the increased screen real estate and granular control afforded by a desktop.

Another factor driving our web-first approach was that in the early days of Buffer, the mobile team had very limited bandwidth: Joel himself created Buffer’s first Android app (it was initially a webview wrapper). In 2012, Sunil took over development of the Android app and made incredible progress converting it from an admittedly crude tool to a much more feature rich, native app. However, Sunil was soon promoted to CTO and, as they do, those responsibilities often pulled his attention elsewhere, leaving the Android app to wait patiently for its forever owner.

As development on Buffer for Android stagnated, Buffer had been incredibly privileged to have Andy Yates steadfastly developing Buffer for iOS. As Buffer employee #1, Andy has been a constant at Buffer from the very start, and is a wonderfully talented iOS developer. In 2014, the state of the iOS and Android apps reflected this: iOS was modern, stable and had a high degree of feature parity while Android fell behind in features, design and user experience.

At this point in 2014, we were very fortunate that Buffer was growing as a company. Buffer was experiencing strong growth in active users, revenue and team size. The Happiness Heroes were hiring, front-end and back-end engineering teams were growing, as were the data and growth teams. But there was one notable exception: the mobile team. During this growth Andy remained our only mobile engineer.

I applied to Buffer in April 2014 as an iOS developer. I was very fortunate to make it through the interview process and in my offer, Sunil mentioned they needed help elsewhere:

“I know you mentioned to me that you’d love the opportunity to work a bit more on Android, even though your experience has been mostly iOS (I loved that!). We desperately need some help with our Android app, so we were thinking of having you join to help us out there first.”

And just like that, I became an Android developer . This turned out to be the best opportunity of my career, and I’m forever grateful to Sunil for the faith that I could do it!

With two full-time mobile developers, things started to move faster at Buffer. We started to dream about what mobile could look like in six months or a year, or further. We started to ask bigger questions of the platforms than we had in the past. What does mobile mean for Buffer? What does it mean for our users? Why haven’t we done much (if anything) mobile-first?

This is where our vision for mobile at Buffer starts to find legs. We are now a team of five mobile developers and one UX Researcher and QA Analyst. We are privileged to have the bandwidth and the ability to execute on the right ideas.

My job right now involves a lot of things: I’m a developer, I hold regular 1:1 meetings with the mobile squad, I try to help the team perform at their best, and I advocate for mobile within Buffer. I am also trying to develop our long-term vision for mobile. I spend time imagining what mobile should and could look like for Buffer, what it means beyond our current offerings.

Admittedly, this is where I struggle the most. It’s hard to sit down and “develop a vision.” It’s hard to know where to start, what it means, or even what the goal is. I prefer to think in concrete terms, and ‘visions’ often feel abstract to me.

So I’ve tried to approach this problem from a more concrete perspective. What do we know (or think we know), and how can that guide us? We know mobile usage will be growing for the foreseeable future, taking desktop share as far as it can reasonably go, probably until all tasks completed on a desktop can only be completed on a desktop. To me, this is a huge revelation. I think mobile will continue to evolve, until everything that can reasonably be done on mobile is done on mobile. There are just so many benefits to having tools and products with low friction accessibility. This is where I see the potential for long-term opportunity: We need to be building more.

We currently only offer one mobile product at Buffer, that is, Buffer for Android and Buffer for iOS. In my heart of hearts, I know there is so much more opportunity for us here. We need to think more creatively, to imagine products far beyond what Buffer currently looks like. As I mentioned, we’re in a privileged position at Buffer in that we can execute on our ideas, both in terms of bandwidth and autonomy within the company. It would be a shame to let that opportunity go untapped.

Armed with this undeniable potential, my goal is to transform Buffer into a mobile-first company. I want push our limits, find more successes, fail more often, incite excitement and advocate for mobile like I haven’t been doing. In a few years, I’d love to see Buffer have a full suite of mobile tools and products, software that genuinely makes peoples’ days better.

To do that, we need to identify real opportunities for solutions and act on them. While that sounds vague, these opportunities are around us every day and it’s on us to carve out the space to act on them. We need to be paying attention, and afford ourselves the forgiveness to fail as long as we try.

We are still in the early days of finding ourselves as a mobile shop within Buffer. If some of this resonates with you, or you have any ideas or thoughts, please leave a comment below or hit me up on Twitter!

And if you’d like to join us on this journey and help guide its direction, the mobile team is hiring :)