Everyone always says, “There’s an app for that”, but what you don’t often hear is, “There’s a story for that app”. I chatted with NibiruTech, the team behind the recently reviewed MobileRSS to learn more about what it’s like having to deal with a government that doesn’t let you browse the web the way it should be.

Where are you?

Chengdu. Behind the Great Firewall (GFW) of China.

What apps do you make and how are they doing?

MobileRSS is Top 10 of all paid News apps in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. TwitBird is the #1 paid twitter client in Japan, Korea, and China. Mobile Translator is performing modestly in Travel apps.

How did you get your start?

We started as Ruby on Rails outsourcers and used the money we made to support ourselves while we experimented with the iPhone. Eventually, our passion for making apps was overwhelming, so we got rid of our clients and focused solely on the iPhone.

What was your first app?

We knew that people bought cool apps, so one of the first apps we made was Twitter 3D, a visual game that allowed users to interact (but not communicate) with the twitter community. It was not very cool, though, so no one bought it. We’d spent so much time working with the twitter API that we had no choice but to create a regular, uncool twitter client, which is how we got TwitBird.

Was it well received?

We were the first twitter client to support inter-app PUSH notifications, so we had a lot of downloads, like 20,000 on the first day. Unfortunately, we also had bad timing. We launched on July 6, 2009, which was the day ethnic riots broke out in the western Xinjiang province. Twitter was suddenly blocked and all access to the outside world was cut off. It was exciting to think thousands of people around the world were using an app that we created, but it was also quite discouraging that we couldn’t use it ourselves or even communicate with our users.

So what happened next?

Well, it was about a week before we were back online. The VPN connection we had was slow and unstable, so we got really frustrated. The downloads of the app dropped off over the next few weeks and we actually decided to give up on development of TwitBird and focus on a GFW-proof app. Just as we made the decision, we received an email from one guy in China saying that he really loved the app and asked us to develop a proxy so that he could use it. It was only one guy, but for some reason we couldn’t say no, so we decided to give it another go. We found that some other folks were also working on a proxy, so we hooked up with them and became the first twitter app in China with an API proxy.

TwitBird is also Big in Japan and Korea. Any idea why?

We have no idea. Our best guess is that it started when Softbank Founder Masayoshi Son, who is Korean-Japanese and has a good following in both countries, switched from another twitter client to TwitBird and tweeted something along the lines of ‘I’m switching because TwitBird has a better translation feature’. It just snowballed from there.

What about the domestic market? The iPhone was late to enter China, did that affect you guys and how are your apps performing there now?

Even before Apple had an agreement with China Unicom to sell in the mainland, plenty of people here had access to iPhones via Hong Kong. We were one of, if not the first, companies in China to focus exclusively on producing iPhone apps. We have both the #1 twitter client and #1 RSS reader app in China, but in terms of revenue, the market is still small for us. The market potential is huge, of course, but most users don’t pay for apps because pirated copies are readily available online. That said, there are plenty of domestic companies earning good money from making apps, but it’s typically not from selling by the download.

So it sounds like most of your users are abroad. Is there any down side to that?

From our perspective, it’s a really great experience. We get to communicate with people from all over the world who we wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to. It’s very liberating. Of course there are challenges to overcome whether they be in communication, design preferences, or whatever, but overall this is better than anything we could have ever imagined.

There have been reports that Apple plans to open 25 stores in China over the next two years. Any thoughts on that?

We’d definitely welcome that! The city we are in doesn’t have one yet. There are “Authorized Resellers”, from which we just bought 4 MacBooks and 1 MacBook Pro, but an Apple store is on a totally different level. It would really be a great achievement for Apple and China. It would go a long way in promoting the brand as well as the important role of design in the daily lives of people here.

Anything else?

Thank you to all our users for their support and feedback. And thanks to you, Federico, for the opportunity to share our story. Keep up the great work on MacStories!