I think Airbnb is the worst offender by far though. Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (just using your examples) operate very dynamic applications at a global scale. AirBnB is a crud app with almost no dynamic content other than the booking system. According to the first site I saw online, they process 6 bookings per second, which I could handle on literally anything with an internet connection. Of all of them, its the one I understand the least.
1. Frequency of usage is low. People might use it once a year on average (unlike Uber which might be used every day).
2. They spend a lot on advertising. You don't have strong free viral growth like you do with chatting apps for example.
3. Most people on the planet are not doing recreational travel. How many people in Africa or Asia will travel to Barcelona this year? Not a lot. This is mostly an app for upper class hipsters, similar to Starbucks.
4. The growth and size is not good compared to other marketplaces. After 10 years in business, eBay had around $6 billion in revenue when there were 1 billion internet users. Airbnb after 10 years has $2.6 billion in revenue and there are 4 billion internet users.
Perhaps Airbnb's problem is... Airbnb? I mean, it's awful. I've had so many bad experiences with Airbnb hosts and Airbnb itself that I've written it off and gone back to a combination of booking.com and Bonvoy (aka Marriott).
The idea of Airbnb seems like it should be profitable, if only it were better managed.
Can someone explain to me what are the technical challenges at Airbnb? They need to handle less requests than the top airlines or hotel booking websites.
Airbnb is a business innovation with a shiny website frontend. But I really don't get all the hype around Airbnb engineering.
Completely disagree on the technology part, everything being written in Perl doesn't help and the user experience is not as good as Airbnb. The main thing going for them is that they have basically every hotel on their platform. And like others mentioned, that a lot of people prefer hotels to airbnbs.
I love Airbnb. I use it almost exclusively (maybe 95% of the time) when I travel and I travel often. I even met my ex-co-founder through staying at his Airbnb. Bearing this in mind I think Airbnb is barking up the wrong tree here. A classic case of a solution looking for a problem. Airbnb are trying to solve a problem with this new move but not one based on a market need like their initial idea. The problem they are trying to solve is they've run out of growth in one market and are obsessed with trying to continue their hockey stick growth so they look to new markets. Lots of companies do this and they all inevitably fail. Doing this rips the soul out of companies and dilutes their value proposition. Growth is great until the delusional need to continue it at all costs becomes a curse. It looks like this is where Airbnb have arrived.
Edit: I just played around with it a bit more and maybe I was a bit harsh. I'm definitely not the target market for this and will never use though I can imagine there is a sizeable number of people who would enjoy this. That said it should definitely be a new app. It doesn't make sense to put it in the main app.
Literally every post about one of these companies has a comment like this. The issue for companies like AirBNB is not that their application is necessarily bafflingly complex (though it is absolutely true that, especially during the nosql era, amazingly baroque and bizarre architectures had a heyday) but that operating reliably at scale is hard, requires good decisionmaking on multiple dimensions, and requires attention to things that "just CRUD app" doesn't capture because none of them actually matter at low scale.
Airbnb is not about the app, it is the database of available rooms with reviews and photos and all the details, also the brand value that generates page views to make those bookings happen.
The app is very very small part of Uber or AirBnb business
But my point is the success of airbnb clearly had very little to do with the quality of their mobile and web apps. It borders on irrelevant.
It'd be a bit like customer service people diving into how google does it because they're so successful. They are. But not because of their customer service.
I’ve grown to appreciate Airbnb for big family trips (access to kitchens being a big plus).
It’s still very funny to me that the site and app look very good and I constantly see Airbnb design writeups but are UX nightmares. I constantly struggle to change certain fields, find my booking information, figure out what page I was looking at… every year there’s some new redesign that theoretically makes things better but I still walk away thinking I would love the website to just work like a faster booking.com or something (booking.com has its own issues, mainly speed, but at least it’s a list of things)
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