"It’s hard to ignore how focused and intimate our time is with our phones," Tumblr lead designer Peter Vidani says. "You’re a lot closer to your content. You’re often by yourself." Since Tumblr adopted Tumblerette as its own iPhone client back in 2009, Vidani’s been in charge of creating a visceral mobile experience for a site growing at warp speed. The company recently released version 3.2 of its app — its first venture off the web and into the language of desktop and mobile applications. Tumblr’s new app only took a few months to build, but required a strange and new way of looking at things on the part of its creators. A site that got its sea legs in the hyper-flexible world of web browsers has grown up and gone native.

One of Tumblr’s most compelling features is that it grants users the ability to drop all kinds of crazy HTML inside posts — which Tumblr discovered ends up being a bit of a pain inside a native app. "We have wildly varied types of content," Irace says, "and there are so many different possibilities — but the browser does all the work." In Tumblr 3.2, the app itself does the heavy lifting, downloading posts of all shapes and sizes and attempting to make them look legible. "There’s something like 32,000 combinations of what a post can be since we give you the freedom to apply your own style and formatting to posts," Vidani says. "The number of things that can be inside a Tumblr post is the limit of your browser window." When an iPhone app like YouTube pulls down a video, the app slots content into various "fields" like Title, Thumbnail, Username, and the video itself. When the new version of Tumblr pulls down content, it can be in any number of codecs, fonts, sizes, colors, and formats. Irace had to painstakingly spend the last month implementing his own version of how a web browser decodes different kinds of Tumblr content, but he knows the company’s bet on flexibility will be worth it. "Native is a great buzzword, especially in the wake of Facebook’s new native app, but the word isn’t important," Irace says. "What matters more is that it’s fast."

Vidani and company's meticulous focus on fine details and community-building has helped Tumblr bloom into a site filled with more than 35 billion posts on 81 million blogs. What began on the web didn’t transition to the small screen as tumultuously as he may’ve imagined, however. "I don’t feel that Tumblr is the web," he says. "Tumblr is the community. Anyone could copy our user interface. We are much more than the medium." Tumblr’s new iPhone app, as well as Photoset, an app it launched in mid-October, demonstrate that Tumblr’s as pliable as the hundreds of thousands of memes that permeate its pages every day. So what’s the hardest part? "I spend two days on something, and [our engineers] spend two weeks of their lives building it," he says as he winces. "But I’m not working with builders. I’m working with people who are critical, and are inventing along with me."