Next week Medium is launching an iPhone app for reading but not writing posts
With Medium, Evan Williams Is Tackling the Future of Writing Online — As a founder of both Blogger and Twitter, Evan Williams helped change the way people write online. Now, with his latest start-up …
Context & Ripple Effects
Evan Williams has now shaped online writing twice — as co-founder of Blogger and of Twitter, which completed its IPO the year before this launch — and Medium is his third attempt, framed by the New York Times as another tackle at 'the future of writing online.' The stakes read differently given Twitter's documented troubles retaining users after signup through early 2014.
The reading-only iPhone app lands three months after Medium's December update of photo, layout and collection tools, which was all about how published work looks. Pairing that investment with a phone client for consumption only signals a deliberate split: Medium treats the phone as a place to read its carefully formatted posts, not a place to write them.
First-order effects
- iPhone users get a native way to read Medium posts and the collections built with December's layout and curation tools, while drafting stays confined to the web.
- Writers are unaffected day-to-day, but the app extends Medium's reach to readers who never open a laptop — expanding the audience their posts compete for without changing how those posts are made.
Second-order effects
- Rival long-form publishing platforms face pressure to ship their own native mobile reading experiences or cede phone-based attention to Medium's polished presentation.
- The contrast with Williams' earlier company sharpens: while Twitter wrestles with post-signup retention, Medium is betting that depth of reading on mobile is the engagement lever the short-form feed never pulled.
Third-order effects
- If the read/write split holds, mobile publishing bifurcates into consumption-first apps and web-first authoring environments, moving the craft of writing toward desktop tools while phones become the primary distribution surface.
- A pattern of platforms curating what gets read on mobile — via collections and editorial tooling rather than chronological feeds — points toward editor-shaped distribution replacing the reverse-chronological default across publishing.
The trend: Publishing platforms are decoupling reading from writing, building phones as curated consumption surfaces first and leaving composition to the web.