It’s Craigslist, Only on a Phone — and Beautiful

Craigslist, the online-classifieds site, is famous for two things: being incredibly popular, and hardly changing at all. So it’s not stunning that it doesn’t have a mobile app. But it’s also not surprising that a bunch of third parties, seeing a market opportunity, have taken stabs at bringing Craigslist to phones.

The attempts I’ve seen have been unofficial, and while they don’t look that much like classic Craigslist, they’re also less than elegant. But now a design company called Mokriya, which normally works on other companies’ products, has released a Craigslist app, Mokriya Craigslist, for iPhone and Android. Though it’s not the official Craigslist app, it is officially licensed by Craigslist, so it shouldn’t be subject to any legal controversy.

More important, it’s a thoughly slick, modern piece of software — one which looks like what Craiglist might be if it had been invented in 2013 by someone who cared about design. You can easily filter results to any category and any regional version of Craigslist and do searches, and results are presented in a beautifully fluid scrolling feed which looks a bit like Pinterest.

You can also post listings to Craigslist from the app, including photos you take with your phone. That feature, along with the ability to favorite listings and create alerts, are reserved for a 99-cent version of the app; everything else is available in a free edition.

I sort of admire Craiglist founder Craig Newmark’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the web has changed since the mid-1990s; if his quirky brainchild ever starts chasing after fads, I’ll be sad. But what Craigslist has done here — allow someone else to reimagine its interface in a manner which complements classic Craigslist rather than replacing it — is cool.