Why Standalone Apps Are Supposed To Fail

It’s scary to move a billion people’s furniture. That’s why Product Manager Michael Reckhow tells me Facebook built Paper. This fear has spawned the standalone app boom of 2014. Tech giants are experimenting with new user experiences outside the hallowed halls of their main apps that are too important to meddle with.

But while the press and public scrutinize the success of these different apps like Facebook Slingshot, Instagram Bolt, and Dropbox Carousel, they may be missing the point. Standalone apps are supposed to fail, at least most of the time.

They’re like a free play in football. The referee has thrown the flag but will let the action continue. The team will get a do-over if they want it. In the meantime, they can try something risky without the consequences, but reap the benefits if things go right.

The Risky Redesign

A common adage is that 1 in 10 startups succeed, but even fewer are true home runs. In consumer social apps, the odds can be even worse. Not only do you need a fun, compelling, immediately accessible product, but you have to foster a loyal community around it.

Constructing that inside another app without screwing up the original experience or burying the new one is nearly impossible. The big guys stopped trying a long time ago. At first glance, Facebook and Twitter haven’t changed in years. Navigation schemes have gotten quicker and images have gotten bigger, but they both fundamentally look and feel the same as they did in 2010.

Redesigning core features can be precarious. One false move can drive away millions of users, along with the dollars they generate. Burying powerful features in a main app relegates them “second-class” experiences, as Mark Zuckerberg told me in an on-stage interview last year. And few features are important enough to unbundle into companion apps.

Facebook Messenger has turned our propensity to chat on mobile into a 200-million-user phenomenon that’s now going from optional to the only way to send Facebook Messages on mobile. But Facebook users have mostly yawned at the high-design of Paper and are sticking with the traditional News Feed.

When giants do overhaul features or add new ones, they’re stuck so far off the beaten feed that they’re forgotten or overlooked by many. Twitter’s tinkering with Discover, or Facebook’s Nearby Friends and Nearby Places get a fraction of the following as their fellow features with the spotlight. If they do gain traction, it’s among isolated clusters or a special demographic. Instagram Direct has 45 million monthly “active” users out of the app’s 200-million-plus total, but that’s just people who at least open a Direct message. The number who actually send them is surely much smaller.

The Expensive Acquisition

While building these new apps within ones that are already exist is tough, not building them can be extremely costly.


Facebook was the biggest photo-sharing app in the world, but it wasn’t built for mobile. Instagram combined filters with a Facebook-style feed that ditched everything but photos, and it took off. Facebook would have to spend $1 billion to buy the upstart before it caused serious problems. Since, Instagram has grown from around 30 million users to over 200 million. Had Facebook hesitated, it would have had to pay much more for it later, or worse, see the app fall into the hands of a competitor.

It wasn’t Facebook or Twitter or Google that discovered the power of ephemeral messaging. It was Snapchat, which had no previous product to shoehorn its self-destructing photos into. It took Facebook a year to wise up, and the shallow clone Poke it devised in just 12 days flopped. Sure it allowed texting, which Snapchat would eventually add. But otherwise Poke was nothing special, and Snapchat was already ordained as cool among kids.

Facebook would reportedly go on to try to buy the app for $3 billion, but get rejected. Now Snapchat is said to be raising money at $10 billion valuation. Facebook was so busy building Timeline to permanently record our lives, it wasn’t experimenting with the idea that not every photo has to live forever.

So, Why Not?

Once it’s clear that it’s hard to hatch new behavior patterns in existing apps but can be expensive to buy new apps that prove users want these experiences, the strategy of building standalone apps comes into focus:

Cheap: Throwing a few designers, engineers, and product managers at an idea is relatively inexpensive for tech giants.
Fast: Since they don’t have to figure out where the product fits in an existing app and can explore new styles, development is quick.
Low-Risk: Built outside their main apps, tech giants don’t have to worry about shocking, alienating, or confusing existing users with changes.
So, why not?

Best-case scenario, the app’s a hit, and a tech giant adds another popular product to its quiver. The app can serve as an extension of the parent company’s main brand that drives lock-in for its family of apps. For example, Dropbox’s standalone photo backup app Carousel was in part designed to get people to buy more Dropbox storage space. Or the standalone can be operated and monetized independently like Instagram with help on business, hiring, engineering, internationalization, and more from the parent company behind the scenes


Even if the app is only a middling success, it can collect data and understanding about users to be applied to a company’s main product. For example, Facebook’s first standalone photo app Facebook Camera served as a testing ground for new features for the main Facebook app. Here Facebook discovered that its little guinea pigs like multi-shot uploads and filters, so even though Facebook Camera would eventually be shut down, it developed and refined critical features through the standalone app model.