The State of Raindrop.io 2019
Hello! My name is Rustem and I’m only one person behind Raindrop.io.
It started as my personal side project in 2013. And it was until the end of 2018… But don’t panic, everything fine 🙌! I have a great news!
It’s hard to work on something else when you have a full time job in terms of productivity. You need to constantly change the focus, work at night, on weekends and so on 😪… I’m sorry for all bugs you have experienced, lack of support and many requested features that are not released yet. But I tried to do my best!
I’m always dreamed to build a product that I will be proud of. Today I take an important step in this direction, I’m quitting my full time job to create my own company!
The revenue and user base is constantly growing. You already saved a 50 million bookmarks in 3 million collections. This numbers are huge! I’m very grateful to and for you! You boys and girls are amazing!
In this post I will highlight some of the progress and share plans for the future.
Much effort has been made behind the scenes. I’m talking about server infrastructure. Due to lack of experience I made many mistakes that slows down development of new features. The old architecture is monolithic, all components are tightly coupled. It’s ok for small project, but unacceptable for solid and reliable service like Raindrop.io 😉
Architecture gradually transforms to truly “cloud” based app
- 🌎 All static content now transferred through CDN (globally distributed network of servers)
- 🚀 Main components like import/export of bookmarks, link parser, broken URL checker, image thumbnail and screenshot service are now fully rewritten and distributed across multiple servers with load balancer. This gives freedom to scale and improved reliability
- 🚢 Way cheaper cloud storage offered by cloud providers gives ability to add features like full page archive, support more file formats and of course increased upload limit at least 10 times. Storage upgrade not fully happen yet, so this features will be added soon
- 🎟 No more complicated billing and payment! Payment by card significantly simplified. Paypal payment now direct without third party services.
👨💻 Safari App Extension
Due to changes in API of recent macOS and Safari updates, our extension stoped work properly. I will share more details in the following post.
Without many words, extension is finally 🎉 available on the App Store!
It has the same functionality as our extension for other browsers, but button indicator (blue icon if page is in bookmarks) not yet implemented. It will be added in following update. Please share your feedback!
What to expect in next few months
- ✨ More server components will be upgraded soon. This gives more flexibility in long term
- 📱 Improved iOS and Android app. Some users have experienced crashes of extension. It will be fixed. Tablets support will be also improved. In next release will be possible to upload local images and add bookmark by URL
- 🔗 Ability to edit URL of bookmark. I know it’s essential feature, but due to some architectural decisions it’s not possible to implement quickly
- Update for Firefox extension. Sometime button icon is disappear. It will be fixed
- And many more, i will share more info in following posts
Sneak peek of Raindrop.io 5.0
Next major release is on the way! In this updated I’m focused on search, basic management features and overall UX.
It contains many lacked features like:
- 🕵🏻♂️ Automatic search: just start typing, results will appear automatically
- 🔀 Manual sorting of bookmarks
- 📂 Bulk edit of collections
- ✍🏻 Inline editing of bookmarks, notes and URL
- 📒 Pagination
- Resizable sidebar ;)
- And of course several UX and performance improvements (especially for users who have tons of collections!)
Expect this update closer to spring.
I’m evolving with Raindrop.io as designer, developer, manager and so on. Some of these competencies are better or worse than others. In my opinion founder should be strong in all areas. This leads to solid product.
You give me the opportunity to evolve! Thank you very much for your support!
