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Five years after its launch, The Atavist Magazine, a digital magazine created by startup Atavist, is killing its native app.
In a post today, cofounders Evan Ratliff and Jefferson Rabb explain their latest decision as a bet on the web. "Our idea was to create a new kind of magazine, specifically designed to be read on phones and tablets," they write in a post today. "So when we sat down to create our publication—and the publishing software behind it, the Atavist platform—there was only one logical place to start: in a native mobile app."
Five years ago, a native app seemed like the best way to design and showcase their stories. But since then, they say, "the web caught up." "Not only was there very little we could do in a native app that we couldn’t do on the web, but the structures of the native app environment made it nearly impossible to design well for both," they write.
Apple and Amazon's app stores presented their own difficulties and delays in allowing new features to be smoothly integrated, they say, while readers are ultimately choosing to find, share, and read stories on social or the web. "In an era where stories are increasingly found and shared through social media, discovery in the app store was a nightmare of its own," Ratliff and Rabb say. "We were reaching a readership often 50 to 100 times larger on the web than what we could in the app."
Atavist's decision to move away from a native app is consistent with what's happened to some other digital first upstarts that have tried to launch an iPad magazine or app. The aptly named The Magazine, an experiment on iOS, folded. Circa, a news app on Android and iOS, shut down earlier this year. The Daily, an iPad-only magazine created by News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch, didn't last two years. Apple itself shuttered its Newsstand app, which relied largely on users finding individual publishers inside of the app.
Directing readers to native news apps ultimately remains a challenge. Readers only want—and check—so many apps. According to a Forrester report earlier this year, 85 percent of a person's time spent on a smartphone is in only a handful of apps. While native apps may be possible for large publishers such as The New York Times or BuzzFeed, who can drive their audiences to their platforms, or for aggregators like Flipboard or Longform, Atavist says, most of the rest of the publishing world must rely on the web—or social apps that drive users back to their sites.
And yet those very social apps where people do spend their time, like Facebook and Snapchat, are increasingly hoping to draw audiences to articles they host natively. Facebook launched Instant Articles earlier this year, and Snapchat launched Discover to give readers a native news experience. Apple News' launch last week now means another platform will host stories too. (Google and Twitter are rumored to be working on a similar "instant" alternative, though Re/code reports they won't host publishers' content.) Atavist acknowledges that in the future they may look to those alternatives. But the web isn't dead just yet.
