All last week, we delivered some very cool announcements for what’s coming up in the year ahead, as we celebrate our 3-year anniversary with an event called [3W/3M/3Y]. And we told you, at the end of that week, that we had our biggest announcement yet to come. Well, here we go…
Today, we are thrilled and excited to announce the 3W/3M Mobile App for iOS and android phones and tablets is coming soon.
The 3W/3M App will be the new, custom-built digital home for everything we do- and it aims to make that digital experience easy, instinctive, communal, and joyous. We encourage you to watch the demo video at the top of this post to see for yourself.
When it comes to comics, nothing will ever replace the printed book- a beautiful, discrete object that can sit on a shelf for generations. We love making things that people can hold and feel in their hands, and that will always be at the center of what we do.
But we also really love and believe in the possibilities of the digital format. The unfiltered brilliance of the colors, seeing the work exactly as the artists intended. Being able to take a mountainous collection with you everywhere, and accessing anything within it with a few clicks. The ability to add in bonus content and features into the work itself, and release that work instantaneously, to the entire world. To work without page borders, on an infinite canvas.
There have been a lot of cool attempts by some amazing people in this space, but one of the things we loved about it was how much of it still somehow felt unexplored. We had a strong conviction that there were untapped strengths, particularly around community and interactivity, that we could take advantage of- but there was no single existing platform that had all those tools we needed to do that.
So, we built one.
Before we get into more details, a couple disclaimers:
First, we built this to be additive, not as a replacement. We’re not leaving Substack, and you’ll still get all the same content in your inbox or via the Substack app that you already receive. Your subscription is still handled through your account here. You don’t need to do or change anything.
Second, we know some of you don’t use apps at all! Don’t worry, as we just said, you’ll still get everything delivered straight to your inbox via Substack. Not only that, but a web version of all of this is also in development, with the hope being we can do the full release simultaneously.
Now, let’s talk a little more about the app itself.
We’ll launch with three tabs:
Discover is where you’ll find our latest and most popular releases and acts as the central hub for everything.
Library is where your personal collection will live, with a wide variety of tools for sorting and filtering; we wanted you to be able organize your collection any way you could imagine.
Finally, Feed is where you’ll get all the latest updates from us, just like the posts here, with the same ability to like, comment, and share.
Of course, all of this secondary to the Reader experience itself, which we designed to have as much optionality and flexibility as possible; you can read in full page or double page spread mode, in mobile-optimized vertical scroll or panel by panel; and moving between those choices takes just a couple clicks.
Then there’s the title pages that categorize by formats, the creator profile pages, and the comprehensive search for everything. There’s hosted podcasts and videos, and the ability to directly buy books in print via Emporia.
We think you’re gonna love it.
As far as logistics of the release goes:
We’re going to roll out this out in phases. Here in the fall, we’ll exclusively invite all members of THE CIRCLE to download the testflight version of the app. From there, if all goes well, we’ll likely broaden the invites out to the full paid community within a couple months.
Please note the version you’ll be getting is an alpha build. We fully expect to find a lot of bugs as we open it up to more users. This is where you come in.
A big reason we’re launching this way is to get your feedback. And not just on what crashes; we want to hear from you on what works and what doesn’t, so we can make using the app even better. We’ll send out regular surveys on this front; please take the time to respond if you can. We’ll also be reaching out to some of you to participate in group sessions to talk about your experiences with the app. Like everything we do, we want to build this with the community.
We’ll be talking more about this in the weeks and months ahead, but this is something we’ve been working on behind the scenes for a very long time. It involved a team of incredible engineers and designers who worked tirelessly to build what you’re about to hold in your hand. We’re all extremely proud of it and can’t wait for you to see it for yourselves. This, as much as anything we’ve announced to date, is about beginning to pull back the curtain on where we’re going next.
New worlds still await, and you’re about to hold them in the palm of your hand.
If you’d like to be among the first to get the 3W/3M app, become a paid subscriber today:
Paid subscriber and want it even sooner? Members of our premium membership tier, THE CIRCLE, will get first access, so upgrade now:
And yes… another [3W/3M/3Y] announcement is coming tomorrow!
[3W/3M/3Y] Introducing The 3W/3M App