Grasshopper (Google)

» see grasshopper.app as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Google ran an incubator inside itself called Area 120, where small teams got to build things that were not search or ads. Grasshopper came out of it in June 2017: a phone app that taught JavaScript in lessons short enough to finish while waiting for something. You tapped code blocks together at first, then typed real syntax, then got a certificate at the end that meant nothing to any employer and was not the point of the exercise.

The design decisions were unusually restrained for the era. No account required to start. No streak pressure. No currency, no lives, no unlockable hint packs. It ran on Android and iPhone and later in a browser at learn.grasshopper.app, and it passed 1.6 million installs on Android without a marketing push. For a few years it was the honest answer to give someone who asked how to start programming and did not own a computer.

Area 120 was gutted in Google's January 2022 reorganization and effectively closed later that year, with most of its projects absorbed or dropped. Grasshopper survived the cull by about a year. Google announced the end in March 2023, told people to export their progress from the settings page, and switched the service off on 15 June. Anyone still logged in on a phone kept a working app until they logged out, which is a strange kind of afterlife.

I learned this stuff in the other direction. In Turkey in the late nineties it was a book, a compiler you got on a cover disc or pulled down over a 33.6k modem across an afternoon, and nobody to ask when it did not build. An app that fits a first loop into four minutes on a phone would have been unimaginable, and I was long past needing it by the time one existed. Grasshopper was for the person I was in 1999, arriving about eighteen years late.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The thing Grasshopper got right was that it taught a real language rather than a teaching language. Scratch and its descendants give you blocks and a good time, and then the wall between blocks and a text editor is a whole second course. Grasshopper started with blocks and walked you across that wall inside the same app, in the same session, without announcing it.

It was also genuinely free in the sense that has become rare. Not free with a subscription upsell at lesson twelve. Google was not trying to convert anyone, because Area 120 projects were not required to make money yet, which is the same reason they were cheap to cancel later.

~ the fall ~

The curriculum stopped early. You finished the fundamentals course and there was no obvious next thing inside the app, so the churn was structural: everyone who succeeded left. A product whose best outcome is that you stop using it has a hard time showing the kind of retention chart that keeps a team funded.

By 2022 the reorganization had already taken the ground out from under it. When the announcement came the following March, the recommendation Google gave departing users was a list of other people's free courses, which is a fair thing to say and also an admission that nothing was replacing it.

~ what came after ~

The idea survived the app. Bite-size code lessons on a phone are now a category with real money in it, mostly subscription-funded, mostly leaning on streaks and notifications in a way Grasshopper never did. What died on 15 June 2023 was the version with no meter running.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »