1) Their backend doesn't scale well enough
2) Artifical scarcity to make people think they are missing out on something
For a while after the Gmail launch, it seemed almost obligatory for new services to launch with long waiting lists and/or scarce invitations.
3) They don't know if their backend scales well.
So their rollout plan is basically to add twice as many accounts each week, then see if it handles the load, then repeat.
1) Gmail 2) mail.com 3) Yahoo mail 4) mailbox 5) Windows Live Hotmail 6) Voice Changer Plus 7) Emoji and Unicode Icons 8) Dragon Dictation 9) Ink Cards Personalized 10) A+ Emotion Icons ... Continues with more completely-unrelated-to-mail results.
If I was searching for a mail client, then mailbox would be it apparently.
FWIW, the reviews on the AU App Store are very mixed - 82 5-star, 20 4-star, 11 3-star, 2 2-star and 58 1-star.
Many of the 1-star reviews are complaining about how this (free) app has a waiting line.
The weird side-effect of this hack is that you get a notification of a new email, then you open the Mailbox app and it has to go retrieve the new email from the server.
Their rationale makes sense - it is better to make people wait than everyone have a crappy experience, but given how easy infrastructure is to come by these days and how quickly one can provision it, I'm worried they're taking too long and people will forget or uninstall the app. That said, when it finally lets me in, this could change my life and I may not even know it. But at this rate, I definitely won't.
So it must be more of a business decision about whether it's worth the cost of firing up all those new servers for a currently free app.
Makes me think they should have just charged for it out of the gate, then they'd have the financial incentive to actually fire up all those servers. Or a "subscribe now" to get to the front of the line.
And I'm not "whining," thank you. I already have access to the app. I just thought it was a fun way to visualize the line.
* business plan to be revealed later.
