Editor’s note: This article was updated in May 2026 to reflect the latest developments in blogging and digital publishing.
In September 2008, a Chinese developer named Feng Huajun quietly submitted a $9 blogging software called BlogPress to the App Store. It supported Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad and Windows Live Spaces. It could edit inline images, which neither the official WordPress nor TypePad apps could handle at the time. And it can cross-post an article to multiple blogs at the same time. The program was not popular. It was not backed by venture capital. But its existence raised a question the blogging organization wasn’t ready to answer: What happens when a solo developer building for a phone can outgrow the features of platforms hundreds of engineers work on?
First raised in the early days of the iPhone App Store, this question has become one of the most enduring structural questions in digital publishing. Nearly two decades later, the pattern he discovered continues to repeat itself: mobile-native tools built by small teams or individuals regularly challenge the assumptions of dominant platforms. The story of BlogPress is more than just a historical curiosity. This is a case study of how the power of the platform changes when publishing moves closer to the device in the creator’s hand.
What BlogPress actually did differently
Context is important. In mid-2008, the iPhone App Store had just launched. Most established blogging platforms treated mobile as an afterthought or marketing effort. Jason KincaidWriting for TechCrunch, he noted that Six Apart has launched an iPhone version of its BlogIt software, which allows users to quickly post updates to blogs, Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Facebook. But the key detail was telling: BlogIt was a web app, not native.
as Scott Gilbertson Spotted in Wired, Six Apart has expanded BlogIt beyond Facebook and onto the iPhone, but clarified that it’s still a web app, not the native app that the company showed off at Apple’s WWDC. The difference between a web app wrapped in a browser and a native app built for the device’s hardware was huge in 2008 and remains so today. Native apps can access the camera directly, manage images with greater flexibility, and offer a writing experience designed for the screen rather than being squeezed onto the screen.
BlogPress, by contrast, was completely native. The app had a built-in rich text editor that allowed images to be placed in the body of a post rather than being added as separate uploads. This was a technical achievement that required working around limitations in the iPhone SDK text framework. The official WordPress and TypePad programs did not offer this possibility. A single indie developer shipped a feature that two well-funded platform companies didn’t.
The app also supported multi-platform publishing. A blogger who maintains a presence on both Blogger and WordPress can write once and publish to both. This cross-posting feature was unique among iPhone blogging tools at the time. This reflects the understanding that many serious bloggers do not live within a single platform ecosystem, but instead maintain a distributed presence across multiple services.
Structural Lesson: Why Small Tools Threaten Big Platforms
In 2008, the traditional assumption was that blogging platforms held the power. Blogger had Google infrastructure. Six Apart had TypePad and Movable Type. WordPress was growing rapidly. These companies controlled the publishing layer, hosting, templates, reader networks. In this context, the mobile app was just a convenience feature, a light front for the real product.
BlogPress challenged this framework by demonstrating what has since become a recurring theme in the creative economy: the writing interface is not a secondary concern. It is a product. For a blogger writing on a commuter train or catching an idea while traveling, the tool that stands between idea and published post is the most important piece of technology in the stack. If this tool is better than the platform’s own offering in third-party software, the platform’s grip is weakened.
This dynamic has played out many times since then. The rise of tools like Ulysses, iA Writer, and Mars Edit have shown that writers often prefer custom composition environments over the built-in editors of publishing platforms. As mobile devices became the primary computing devices for millions of creators, the model gained momentum. In the mid-2020s, the idea that a blog platform’s web-based editor is “good enough” has become more of a liability than a safe assumption.
What BlogPress discovered early on was that platform lock-in weakened when the creative act moved to a different application layer. If the tool on which writing occurs is separated from the platform on which publishing occurs, switching platforms becomes very easy. A blog post designed in BlogPress can just as easily go to Blogger or WordPress or TypePad. The platform is subject to change. The program became permanent.
What those in office have done wrong
The mistake Blogger and Six Apart made in 2008 was not ignorance. Both companies realized that mobile is important. Six Apart showed off a native app at WWDC. Blogger had mobile hosting capabilities. The mistake was more subtle: they saw mobile blogging as a scaled-down version of desktop blogging, not as a distinct creative mode with its own requirements and opportunities.
This reductive thinking manifested itself in specific design choices. Images as add-ons, not built-in elements. Inline text editors that remove formatting options. Mobile posts are supposed to be short status updates, not content articles. These choices reflected a mental model where “real” blogging happens on a desk and mobile is for quick notes.
Feng Huajun does not share this assumption. Its improved built-in image editor, support for multiple blog posts, and cross-posting made mobile blogging seem like a premium creative activity. The app was priced at $9, a sign that it was a professional tool rather than a throwaway utility. The pricing strategy itself carried an argument: mobile blogging is worth paying for, because mobile blogging is real blogging.
This miscalculation by incumbents is an ongoing pattern in digital publishing. Platforms routinely underestimate the subtleties of their most loyal users. They optimize for the median job, for the casual poster, for the user who might be confused. And professional bloggers and serious publishers steer towards tools that respect their workflow. When platforms can’t serve power users on devices that users actually carry, third-party tools fill the gap. Once a creator’s workflow lives in a third-party tool, the platform’s strategic position is eroded.
As the App Store Disrupts the Publishing Ecosystem
BlogPress’ journey through Apple’s review process is instructive in itself. Feng described three rejections before approval. The first was related to the Picasa Web Album integration issue. The second was a disagreement over whether rendering raw HTML during editing was a feature or a bug. The third was related to the camera orientation problem in landscape mode. Each refusal added about a week of delay.
The frustrations were real, but Feng’s conclusion was measured. He noted that the App Store solved a number of practical problems that independent developers on other platforms had to manage on their own: distribution, payment processing, copy protection and discoverability. The trade-off between Apple’s editorial control and Apple-provided infrastructure was, in his estimation, favorable to developers.
This observation anticipated a debate that will define the next decade of the platform economy. The App Store’s role as a gatekeeper created friction, but it also created a market where a solo developer in China could reach iPhone users around the world without building a marketing apparatus, payment system or anti-piracy framework. For blogging tools in particular, this meant that any developer who understood the needs of bloggers could compete with established companies on a relatively level distribution surface.
The long-term impact for publishers is worth noting. The App Store model and the mobile app ecosystem it created created a permanent alternative distribution channel for writing tools. Blogging platforms can no longer assume that their in-house editors will be the default composition environment. The competitive surface has expanded from “which platform has the best features” to “which tool offers the best writing experience on which device,” and that expansion has never gone back.
What This Means for Publishers Now
The BlogPress story offers some solid suggestions for anyone publishing professionally online, especially those who run their own blogs or build audience-driven businesses.
First, the development environment is more important than most platform strategies admit. Publishers who judge blogging platforms solely on hosting, SEO features, or template quality may be overlooking the most consequential variable: how well the platform supports the actual act of writing on the actual devices used for writing. A platform with excellent SEO tools but a mediocre mobile editor is vulnerable to the same competitive dynamics that BlogPress used in 2008.
Second, cross-platform publishing capabilities remain strategically important. The ability to compile once and distribute to multiple endpoints, which BlogPress offers as a native feature, has become a standard expectation among professional publishers. Tools like Buffer, Zapier integrations, and headless CMS architectures all come from the same idea: tying content creation to a single distribution channel is a fragility, not a feature.
Third, the history of blogging tools shows that the most meaningful innovations often come from independent developers, not platform officials. WordPress itself started as a fork of an existing project. Ghost came out of a Kickstarter campaign. Substack was built by a small team who saw an opening that the mainstream platforms were ignoring. Publishers that focus only on what their current platform offers and ignore the independent tool ecosystem may miss the next shift in how publishing actually works.
The silent work that BlogPress developed in 2008 wasn’t really about an iPhone app. It was about the structural weakness that occurs when a dominant platform treats creative workflow as secondary to its distribution infrastructure. That vulnerability has not been fixed. As publishing has become more mobile, more distributed, and more reliant on the tools creators choose for themselves, the lesson has become more acute. The platforms that survive for the long haul will be the ones that take seriously the experience of writing as a solo developer working alone on an app that no one cares about.
