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Medium Adds Mobile Blogging to Its iOS App

1_HCtNjBJEMsNRJtV3sPw9jw[1]A couple days ago I posited that Medium had decided to become a platform and not a publisher, and they’ve just proven me correct.

Medium released a new version of its iOS app on Thursday. When launched last March, the app let users read posts on Medium. Now it supports writing posts as well:

The new mobile Medium editor makes it easy share your stories and ideas on the go and, similar to our new homepage editor, comes with a set of features designed to help you focus on your writing: titles are an option but aren’t required, there’s simple header and quote formatting, it features smart typography, and adding links and photos is a breeze. You can also use voice dictation to speak and write.

You can find the app in iTunes.

In addition to the new-found writing features, the app also gained a bunch of reading features. The app now supports a search function, and it will also let users read short posts directly from their Medium home stream. And last but not least, media like Tweets, audio, and Youtube videos can now be embedded in a post (as opposed to a link to an external location).

Yep, Medium is a blogging platform – or at least it will be once it has an Android app and starts to offer usable RSS feeds.  Now that Medium supports mobile blogging, Android and RSS are the two most glaring deficiencies.

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Comments


Yellow Buick Review March 22, 2015 um 1:45 am

Funny thing: back in September 2014, I attended Evan Hansen’s talk at Medium’s SF offices as part of the NewCoSF conference. Hansen said that they very much envisioned Medium as both a platform and publisher…and stated unequivocally that they would never support mobile authoring of Medium posts. Hansen felt that Medium’s brand as a home for thoughtful, longform content required the elegance and focus of Medium’s desktop-based writing environment, something he doubted they could transpose to mobile.
Apparently, Medium feels they have solved this problem. Is it that iPhone 6+’s offer larger virtual keyboards… or that mobile blogging is a much juicier proposition to investors?

Nate Hoffelder March 22, 2015 um 10:25 am

The latter, I think. You can do a lot on an iPhone or iPad, but I have to agree with Hansen that mobile can’t match "the elegance and focus of Medium’s desktop-based writing environment" for writing longer pieces.

I don’t know that this was a reversal of a firm policy; it makes me wonder what Medium’s long term goal is. As a publisher, Medium is unique, but as a blogging platform it’s not. As I pointed out last September, there are a couple dozen blog platforms out there, including some which are as minimalist as Medium.

The options range from self-hosted (Github as well as your own server) to low cost or even free options. Heck, even Evernote has a blog platform (Postach.io) which just goes to show that the idea has become a commodity.

Just about the only thing that sets Medium apart as a blog platform is that it has the hype right now. Take away the buzz, and what’s left?


Nate Hoffelder March 22, 2015 um 11:29 am

Here’s an interesting critique of Medium which argues that its obsessive focus on a lack of typography options is a flaw, and not a feature.

Money quote:

Boiled down, Medium is sim­ply mar­ket­ing in the ser­vice of more mar­ket­ing. It is not a “place for ideas.” It is a place for ad­ver­tis­ers. It is, there­fore, ut­terly superfluous.

Yellow Buick Review March 22, 2015 um 3:28 pm

That’s a really interesting article, Nate. Thanks for the reference. The quote for me is

And com­ing full cir­cle—what’s the in­dis­pens­able tool for cre­at­ing this il­lu­sion of an ed­i­to­r­ial ecosys­tem? The ho­mo­ge­neous de­sign.…In truth, Medium’s main prod­uct is not a pub­lish­ing plat­form, but the pro­mo­tion of a pub­lish­ing plat­form.


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