Yes it is true! We basically saw so many unanswered questions on StackOverFlow about how to implement Lucene in mobile apps that we thought it would be a great problem to tackle :) The thing is the market was not as great as we expected/hoped or maybe more difficult to penetrate. We did, however, get a lot of positive feedback about the UX of the search with people wanted to do the same thing online. So we pivoted :)
And that was one of our best decisions! We rapidly realized that all the choices we made for mobile were great fits for user-facing search! Because of the hardware constraints of mobile, we couldn’t use the traditional search approaches used by Elasticsearch for example. The form factor also drove a lot of our decisions (instant display of results as you type, typing mistake tolerance, factoring geo-distance in the ranking, etc.). In the end it shaped the technology and is a big reason for our current success :) We probably never would have made the same choices had we started on servers.