"Mobile App Development Should be Painless" says Chen Fishbein, Codename One CTO

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background

I started my professional career working for a small Java consulting firm with a heavy emphasis on mobile development. Through that work I arrived at Sun Microsystems (the creators of Java) where I worked on development tools for operators. One of my first major projects there was as the lead engineer to the Sprint Wireless Toolkit which was a very popular mobile development tool at the pre-Android/iPhone era.

I followed up by building LWUIT which became the most popular library for mobile development at the time and garnered a major following. It was open sourced by Sun and forks were picked up by several companies such as Nokia, Samsung etc.

In 2012 I quit Oracle (which purchased Sun Microsystems) to form Codename One with Shai Almog.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Codename One is an Open Source, Write Once Run Anywhere solution for mobile, desktop and web. It’s the most popular/powerful tool of its kind for Java and Kotlin developers.

What is the origin story?

Shai and myself were frustrated with LWUIT at Oracle. We felt that working at a major corporation was holding us back from building a true cross platform solution. Since the code was already open source we quit and picked up where we left off. Proceeding to add support for iOS, Android, Web, UWP and Windows/Map desktop.

We also built a cloud platform that simplifies the process of building the apps, IDE integrations and a lot more.

Being open-source we formed a community around the project and even hired developers from that community to grow the project. Later on we met Steve Hannah who became a lead engineer and now an equal partner in the company. He started off as a 3rd party community member who contributed code and used the product. That’s the power of open source!

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Shai and myself worked on cross platform Java development tools for mobile since the 90s. There are very few people on earth with our depth of experience on this subject. We’re also childhood best friends who can fight and switch right back to friendly conversation. In that sense, while we do argue sometimes we do let a consensus form and move past disagreements reasonably well. As engineers we’re very data driven, as such people change their minds and admit mistakes when proven wrong. That’s very powerful.

The main challenge in our field isn’t technical. We already solved the technical problems and have a product that’s faster/smaller/more powerful than any direct competitor. The challenge is visibility and major market traction.

Our team is evolving to meet those challenges by learning from other tools in our field and forming the right collaborations to achieve that.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Taking the kids for a trip around the world.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We used to be glued to the MRR chart and focus a lot on that. We recently switched to focusing on signups, traffic and more general growth metrics.

The main reason for the switch is that we open sourced some additional pieces of the code which might impact short term MRR but should lead to growth in other aspects.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

When we launched we had a super cheap plan at $9 per month. In 2015 we came to the conclusion that this isn’t a tenable price and raised it to $19.

People who had an existing subscription and didn’t cancel could keep their existing $9 price point. To this day there are many subscribers that still pay us $9 every month. It doesn’t contribute much to the bottom line of the company but it makes me happy that people stick with us for so long. There are many subscribers in the higher tiers that are with us for this amount of time but this specific tier makes our retention value obvious.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

We’re excited about reactive programming. Codename One was written as an imperative framework which has many advantages. However, we’re now releasing a reactive framework on top of it which is pretty exciting. We’re also pretty excited by Kotlin and some of the new Java 17 capabilities.

I’m not worried about mobile fragmentation but I think developers should be worried. For us this is an advantage. We’re introducing support for non-Google Play devices to alleviate fragmentation issues within Android.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Shai: I published on HackerNoon back when it was still a Medium publication. I appreciate its reach and clean interface.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Invest in bitcoin and Apple…

Seriously, focus on some of the non-technical strengths. Management, marketing, sales etc. In a startup we’re all “Jacks of all trades” and that’s essential.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

You should re-heat a pizza in the frying pan with a bit of water and a lid. It crisps up the bottom nicely. Better than an oven!