Cleaning Startup Homejoy Launches Its First iPhone App

Two years after Homejoy first launched its home cleaning service, the startup is releasing an iPhone app — its first native experience for smartphones.

It seems a little crazy for a current-day, consumer-facing startup to wait that long to build a real presence on mobile, particularly when you’re talking about a company as well-funded as Homejoy.

Vice President of Engineering Mark Linsey acknowledged that it might seem like Homejoy is coming to this a bit late. Apparently consumers have been using the service on their smartphones already, with mobile web traffic doubling as a percentage of total traffic in the past year. As for why it took so long to release an app, Linsey said the team was focused on perfecting the cleaning experience first. (I’ve written about some of the backend technology that goes into managing Homejoy cleaners.)

The company didn’t provide me with a demo or advanced copy of the app. It sounds, however, like the app should be pretty familiar to Homejoy’s web users — Linsey described it as “delivering Homejoy in your pocket.” The challenge, he said, was making sure that experiences like entering your credit card information and scheduling a cleaning were easy on your phone.

Does the move to mobile suggest that Homejoy could adopt a more on-demand model? Asked if mobile app users might be more interested in scheduling same-day cleanings, rather than waiting days or weeks, Linsey replied, “I can’t say anything specifically in terms of plans, but your logic makes a lot of sense. We’re experimenting with how we make the experience as convenient as ever.”

(Another Homejoy experiment that we found out about recently — providing other home services beyond cleaning.)

You can download the app here. And yes, there are plans for an Android app too, though Linsey declined to offer a specific timetable.