Dear community,
I am thrilled to announce that we're launching the first version of Xayn Web. Starting today, Xayn's popular discovery features are also available in BETA on search.xayn.com/search. Given that Xayn is – like many other majorly successful apps – developed with a mobile- first approach, launching the web version is a big milestone for us towards multi-platform support all via one code base (for details see below). Continue reading for all the details on what you can expect from our Xayn Web, as well as some technical insights to how we managed to bring it to life. Happy reading!
Starting today, Xayn Web is out in BETA mode on https://xayn.com/search. After a brief AI initialisation upon opening Xayn's website for the first time, here are all the functions you can expect to find in Xayn WebBeta:
In its early BETA version, Xayn Web is best supported on Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers. We therefore recommend that you try out our web version with one of those browsers. Please note that due to technical developments, Xayn is not optimised for Apple's Safari Browser, yet.
As you know, Xayn is written in Flutter, a software development framework that's designed to function both on mobile and web with the same code base. This contrasts with the 'conventional' approach of having one team for mobile development and one for web/desktop development, in which scenario the underlying programming languages employed usually differ. While this has some advantages, this approach brings all kinds of complexity to the development landscape, including the need to have twice as many software developers or the eternal struggle of always ensuring feature parity! Therefore, we chose a different route for Xayn with Flutter. While being very promising with much forward- looking potential, the Flutter framework is still in the early stage of production readiness. This means that in part, Xayn is limited in development by the boundaries of Flutter's web support. For this reason, you will likely experience certain performance issues in the web version in comparison to the app. But luckily, the Flutter contributors work avidly on bringing Flutter Web on par with Flutter Mobile! Just half a year ago, it would not have yet been possible to launch Xayn Web written in Flutter! And today, we're happy to enjoy a grade of performance that allows us to launch Xayn in BETA :slightly_smiling_face: :rocket:.
So what do you think? I hope you like the first glance at our web version as much as we do! And as always, we could not get anywhere without your manifold feedback. Therefore, if you have ideas, questions, found a bug or have further feature requests, you can contact us via support@xayn.com. Many thanks for your continued support, we appreciate all the input you keep giving us.
Also, if you haven't already, make sure to follow us on social media – e.g., on our new Instagram channel!
Happy discovering,
Leif
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