Why we started building for the browser

For most of our history, Zydeno meant phone apps. iPhone first, then Android, built slowly and shipped carefully. That hasn’t changed. What changed is that we started looking more honestly at where people spend their working hours — and for a lot of them, it’s a browser window on a laptop.

So we now make Chrome extensions and Edge add-ons too. This is a short note on why, and on what we decided not to do along the way.

The browser is where the keyboard is

The first app we brought over was KeyRush, our typing trainer. On a phone it always had a slightly odd job: it teaches you to type on a physical keyboard, but it lives on a device that doesn’t have one. People used it and liked it, but the gap was obvious. The person practising touch typing is usually sitting at a desk, in front of a computer, with a browser already open.

Putting KeyRush in the browser wasn’t expansion for its own sake. It was moving the app closer to the place where the skill it teaches is actually used.

Extensions are small on purpose

We like constraints, and extensions are full of them. A popup is a small window that closes the moment you click away. An extension competes for a spot in a toolbar that’s already crowded. Users are — rightly — suspicious of anything that asks to read the pages they visit.

Those constraints push toward exactly the kind of software we already try to make: focused, quiet, and honest about what it touches. An extension that tries to be a whole platform is usually a bad extension. One that does a single thing well, and gets out of the way, fits the format.

The same logic applies to BBH, our porn and website blocker. On a phone, blocking has to fight the whole system. In the browser, the extension is the natural place for it — that’s where the sites are opened, so that’s where a blocker belongs.

Why Chrome and Edge

Both browsers run the same extension model, so supporting both doesn’t mean writing two products. It means one codebase, two store listings and two review processes. We chose to do the extra listing work because plenty of people use Edge simply because it came with their computer, and we’d rather meet them where they are than ask them to switch browsers for us.

What we didn’t do

We didn’t build a web app with accounts. That would have been the conventional move: a website, a login, progress synced to a server. It would also have broken every principle we already hold. Our extensions keep data in the browser, on the device, the same way our phone apps keep it on the phone. Small, fast and respectful of the person using it.

We also didn’t treat the browser as a dumping ground for phone apps. Not every app we make belongs in a toolbar. A meal planner, for instance, made more sense to us as a proper desktop window than as a popup — which is part of why we also started shipping Windows apps, but that’s a separate post.

What it’s taught us so far

Mostly, that the fundamentals travel. People in a browser want the same things people on a phone want: software that starts quickly, does what it says, and doesn’t ask for more than it needs. The details change — screen sizes, permissions, how data is stored — but the standard doesn’t.

We’re still a small team, and adding platforms is not free. Every new store is another listing to maintain, another review queue, another set of edge cases. We take each one on only when we’re sure the app is genuinely better for being there. For the browser, we were sure.