- There is no single Play Store equivalent, so the barrier to make people install a relatively unknown app is higher.
- Phones do not come with Google Services Framework, so the barrier to develop a networked app is higher.
- Just like everywhere else, people will use whatever is available because a suboptimal solution is still better than opting out completely from the benefits these solutions bring.
I don't think in China specifically it's about low-end devices or data cost at all. South East Asia - perhaps, but all in all the situation reflects the structure of the economies (the prevalence of monopolistic conglomerates with a finger in every pie).
Most of the time the most widespread solution is far from excellent because it only has to be better than the competition. Even more so when competition is limited by entry barriers to the point it hardly exists. So while the article is a good summary of the situation, it ends up being a bit like wondering why people use Windows.
Android is already one abstraction layer on top of another, there is no intrinsic technological benefit of adding yet another one OS-like super app on top of it, or at the very least any such benefits remain to be demonstrated.
In China and other emerging markets, downloading apps from app store are just something that many users would rarely do, no matter it is App Store, Play Store, or many other Android App Stores available in China. It is a big obstacle that most US developers never realised.
The main benefit of super apps, and why it is so popular in those countries, is that it doesn't require users to download anything to use new feature. In some use cases I also found that so convenient.
Just as an example, WeChat has an ecosystem of mini-apps. When you go to a restaurant in China, you can often find QR code on each table. If you can that QR code, it would open a mini-apps that lets you place orders and make payments, without waiting for the waiter to serve you. A mini app is like a website that doesn't require download and storage on the phone, but the user experience feels more native and is tightly integrated with features available in WeChat. It would be much harder to get users if the same thing requires you download an app.
> In China and other emerging markets, downloading apps from app store are just something that many users would rarely do, no matter it is App Store, Play Store, or many other Android App Stores available in China. It is a big obstacle that most US developers never realised.
As someone who's never been to China and has never used a super-app: just curious, what are some of the obstacles faced installing a mobile app? Is it that most people don't trust un-curated apps?
On Android, there isn't one single authoritative app store (since the Play Store isn't available). Therefore every carrier, OEM, major app maker make their own app store (which behaves belligerently to their competitors). The users and app makers get caught in the middle of this messy fight. As a user, you might pick the 'wrong' app store. And developers will never have time to upload every update to 100 app stores, each of which may require slightly different metadata. So the stores clone each other's APK which lead to very slow and irreversible rollouts for devs. In a hyper competitive environment like China, not being able to control exactly when your binaries deploy is a huge, vital vulnerability so it has to be solved.
A super app that brings existing user bases solves both the deployment and discoverability problems.
In China (especially in tier 3,4 cities and rural places) and similar markets alike where many user have low digital literacy, installing apps from App Store is a skill that lots of users don't have. Their first few apps on their phone were most likely installed with someone else's help.
Actually learning every new app is an obstacle, but they managed to learn to a few apps like WeChat because it's super useful. They won't spend time to learn about something that won't bring immediate reward. Once they have a few apps installed on their phone, they'd feel that's enough.
Possible, but I see two big obstacles:
1. Mini-apps are optimized for this one purpose and feels much faster and native, websites won't be able to achieve the same.
2. Some features provided by WeChat is actually important, especially the payment part. Websites won't be able to integrate something like WeChat pay seamlessly as mini-apps do. If it requires users to put in credit card information, it would instantly fail in these countries
I can't comment on 1 but for 2, I'm seeing a lot more merchants (probably Shopify merchants) support mobile payments on their websites (yes websites, not mobile apps) these days.
I can now go to a vendor's website (say jrwatkins.com, etc.) on my phone, checkout, do a fingerprint/face scan on Apple Pay and the transaction is done in under 5 seconds.
I assume the experience with Google Pay is similar.
There's no longer a need to create an account on the website. The delivery address defaults to the one on Apple Pay (and can be modified at time of payment). Delivery method can also be selected on the Apple Pay screen. My credit card number is never transmitted. This type of frictionless checkout that was once the domain of companies like Hoteltonight is now becoming more common on ecommerce sites.
Yeah, if Apple Pay and Google Pay has the same market share then website could integrate those service and achieve the same, I agree. However, Apple Pay and Google Pay are also harder to use from the perspective of both consumers and merchants in these countries in the beginning, and IMO that's the reason they failed in the first place.
I don't know what payment methods these services require now, but in the beginning at least, they both supports just credit cards, which is basically suicidal. Most users won't be able to use it at all.
From merchants' perspective, they don't need to pay for transactions on WeChat Pay or AliPay, whereas both Apple Pay and credit card companies would charge them for usage. For this reason most small business wouldn't even think of using them.
> Yeah, if Apple Pay and Google Pay has the same market share then website could integrate those service
According to the Apple developer docs[1], websites don't have to integrate with Apple Pay specifically; Safari also supports the (fairly new) platform-neutral Payment Request API[2]. Google's docs[3] suggest that something similar is available for Chrome on Android.
Well, from what I'm seeing Apple Pay is gaining traction here in the U.S. Since the NFC part isn't proprietary, it works with almost any terminal (Ingenico, Verifone) that supports contactless payments (with few exceptions).
It supports Apple Cash, which in turn can funded via a bank debit card. (kind of like Venmo). There's no transaction fee with Apple Cash.
I believe there are currently no additional fees on the merchant side to accept Apple Pay [1], unless the customer uses a credit card via Apple Pay in which case the standard credit card fees apply.
The point is the QR based wechat payment is available for all kind of phones and it's available early than apple pay or google pay.
Some merchant like a fruit stand can accept a QR payment, and I don't think they can afford a post machine.
yup, and we need to think about the timeline. At very early stage of this story, only limited phones support NFC, So wechat/alipay can quickly occupy the market with the QR base solution.
I was also thinking about Apple Pay in my original comment. But that's iOS-only, and I'm going to hazard a guess that Google Pay doesn't work in China, so we're back to GP's point.
Right since the existing players are entrenched, but might work for other (emerging) countries?
We've never been big on mobile payments in the U.S. (because credit cards), but I'm finding myself using Apple Pay more and more. I read somewhere than ~50% of payments in the U.S. are now contactless.
I think it largely depends on how much Apple Pay / Google Pay could abandon their western centric design and invest heavily on localization. Payment solutions are just hard to unify - Lots of people in Indonesia don't have bank accounts, Bank transfer is actually a popular way of transaction in Brazil...
On Android, there's Instant Apps[1] though for some reason Google hasn't integrated them on all devices. They work through links/QR codes and through NFC tags. I believe they might also be accessible though the Google Bluetooth Le beacon API (so when you enable the specific feature, you'll get a popup like "this location serves the following app" which you can then instantly launch).
I don't know about iOS but the two copy features from each other all the time so Apple probably has it too (if they weren't the first to launch them).
Honestly, if you're working from a QR code you might as well just serve a mobile web app. If you add PWA support your customers might even install it if they come around often.
> Android is already one abstraction layer on top of another, there is no intrinsic technological benefit of adding yet another one OS-like super app on top of it, or at the very least any such benefits remain to be demonstrated.
This has to be prove by market. If the OS-ish super apps are winning, means the customers are approving it.
The way WeChat distributes additional content is in the form of mini-apps, which has no similarly to GMS. It is something that does not exist in the ecosystem of US apps.
I think what you said have merits, which I'm in no position of judging, but a couple facts are incorrect:
- there are multiple play store equivalent, i.e. Mi Store, Baidu store, and several others.
There is actually more competition at app store level in China, as opposed to Google's monopoly on that front, which might be the reason why user behaviors are different.
- not sure how you define OS-like abstraction layer, but Chrome is also basically a super app. In fact, developing for Wechat is more similar to developing website than native app.
> Phones do not come with Google Services Framework, so the barrier to develop a networked app is higher.
What do developers do for push messaging? In older versions of Android, you could maintain a connection to your server in the background, but recent versions make it really hard to stay active, even if you're big enough to get whitelisted by phone OEMs --- if you're small, is it even possible?
> - Phones do not come with Google Services Framework, so the barrier to develop a networked app is higher.
Looking at f-droid: hobbyists seem to do just fine without google play services. I feel like this gives you a business advantage rather than a technical one.
People who don't run Play services by choice will typically use MicroG [1], which still uses Google infrastructure.
F-Droid is doing fine but mostly with a certain kind of apps that either run entirely on the device, or connect to third-party networks via more or less established protocols like IMAP, XMPP, OpenDAV, etc.
Google provides Cloud Messaging, Firebase, etc. free of charge. Everything can be worked around with enough money thrown at it of course but choices like this tip the scale in favor of going for a mini-app instead of a standalone one.
Not all users who eschew Google Play services are using MicroG. I would be surprised if even a majority were. These days, the sole remaining large community for bare Android is Lineage, and not only does it ship without MicroG, any discussion of MicroG is banned on its channels.
I have set up Android phones with Lineage for several relatives, and if the user is comfortable doing online banking through the browser instead of a bank-provided app, then there is really no need for Google Play services or the MicroG substitute. Whatsapp runs fine without Play services, and in my region OSM-based maps are a viable competitor to Google Maps.
I go searching and I can't figure out what some of the apps even "DO", others are "Here is this app, you need to install these other things too to make it work, also it only works with X, so maybe it will work for you I duno....".
Now I get why it is the way it is, I don't expect much more from folks putting out software for me like that, but it's a terrible user experience.
Conversely I always look on FDroid first because for me the quality of apps is higher and the level of shady BS is minimal. I only resort to the Play store if there’s no open source alternative.
This has very little to do with what I said (arguing some library doesn’t make things easier) but ok.
>I go searching and I can't figure out what some of the apps even "DO",
It’s been a couple years but I don’t remember the play store being different.
>Here is this app, you need to install these other things too to make it work
Like the Termux API app needing termux? That’s the only one I remember being like that. Most of the apps I used were self contained. Do you have an example?
From memory F-droid was much better than google play except for the lower selection but it has been a while.
What are you installing to make it a bad user experience?
I don't have google services (no google account) at all, only use F-Droid and Aurora store and haven't any problems. Even convinced a friend to go the same route with minimal handholding and they aren't technically inclined - no problems.
The Fire Phone had other issues. It was a new player in a crowded market and had no reason to exist. It had one gimmick, but it was forgettable enough that I can’t even remember what it was right now, but I remember it was dumb.
Google themselves has struggled in this market: see the Nexus line.
This is the history of software, and other businesses as well.
From Jim Barksdale:
“Gentlemen, there’s only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling.” And said, “We’ve got an airplane to catch.” And we left, and Peter Currie, walking out the door, said, “Those people are looking at you, Barksdale, like you’re crazy. What did you just say?” And I said, “Well, best I can tell, most people spend half their time adding and other people spend half their time subtracting, so that’s what works out.”
Of course the largest "super app" is the operating system as it constantly offers new APIs etc.. and devours more features by point solutions leading to terms like being Sherlocked:
I feel like OS as a superapp is an underappreciated concept.
Like the idea that fish don't see water. On one side we have WeChat, but on the other side we have IOS, Android, and the browser.
And we're free... to install approved apps from approved sources. Free... to view stuff inside a browser window that works the way the platform owners want it to.
What if we could unbundle the operating system? I wonder what innovations we're missing out on?
For example, true peer to peer networking would be nice. I don't think we'll ever see it from Apple or Google. It's a hard problem sure, but it's also not in anyone's interest to allow people to communicate directly without platforms intermediating.
People don't WANT an unbundled OS. What does unbundled from the browser even mean? I can imagine my mom on day one with an unbundled OS ... "Well, first you need to download a browser, I recommended firefox but you have sooo many choices now that they are unbundled! What are those choices? Well, if you go www.browserchoicesexplaned.unbundled you'll ... oh, wait"
That's a pretty useless definition of "bundling" though, since it only applies to ONE popular OS and, you CAN install alternative browsers (I use firefox), developers just have to use the iOS browser stack. You can share bookmarks, etc.etc. with their non iOS installations on other platforms.
It's a pretty important one. iOS's lack of support is the main thing that is preventing "PWA"'s from taking off. They're already pretty viable on Android. It's the iOS's browser stack that prevents them from being viable cross-platform, and locks everyone into the the 30% Apple tax.
People don't want shit browsers either. IE6 was a trainwreck and wasn't improved for years purely because Microsoft didn't have to - coz it was bundled.
Companies like to bundle products because they know that when they do that they can sell more mediocrity at a higher price.
>IE6 was a trainwreck and wasn't improved for years purely because Microsoft didn't have to
Remind me how that turned out for them.
They _thought_ they didn't have to. Bundling is a powerful strategy, but it isn't a magic wand that dispels competition. You still need to offer a compelling product.
Microsoft's failures as a monopoly helped write the book on how to keep your monopoly.
Apple learned that a monopoly is only illegal when it stifles competition, but if no competition is ever allowed then regulatory bodies completely overlook it.
Google learned that you don't have to stifle the competition, instead you overwhelm them with openness. You make everything you do an open or standardized and keep dumping it over the fence.
>...if no competition is ever allowed then regulatory bodies completely overlook it.
Regulators look at the market. When they looked at desktops in 2001 they saw Microsoft with 90%+ domination and were concerned that consumer choice might be compromised and was being abused. For mobile they don't look at the 'iOS market', they look at the smartphone market and see Apple with less that 50% of it in the US.
So if you're concerned about Apple's potential abuse of it's power over it's users, which is entirely fair, anti-trust simply isn't the way to look at it. You'd need to go to regular consumer protection legislation.
Apple is sh*t at stifling competition, they have less than 20% of the world smart phone market and a half dozen major competitors.
Google stifles competition by using their incredible ad revenue engine to fund products like Android and then giving them away for what amounts to "future consideration", effectively destroying the non-apple OS market as well as other markets.
I'm not really disagreeing with you, but I don't think it's because they're not good at it, I think they genuinely just don't care about stifling competition. They consciously target their products at the high end, professional and affluent customers. They're a premium brand. They have no more interest in chasing market share on the desktop or mobile than Gucci has in chasing market share in handbags.
They didn't! Their revenue is driven by enterprise, and enterprise businesses are still using IE11 and will be for years to come.
MS doesn't care about the browser; they care about the friction that sells Windows on PCs and USLs for Office 365/etc. Otherwise, they would have stamped out Chrome years ago. They care now because newer web frameworks have proliferated, and Microsoft has the means to shift customers from IE11 ActiveX apps or whatever to Azure-hosted services like PowerApps.
It's one of the shitty things about this era... nobody is motivated to care much about the computers that we all rely on to work. Windows 10 lacks a unifying vision, MacOS is sort of a hobby project in the company, and Linux desktop is a dumpster fire.
I've worked at several enterprise companies, two banks and an exchange, and all of them have Chrome and Firefox installed on all their desktops as standard. Everyone I know mostly uses Chrome.
Generally the IT department apps target IE as they are Windows shops, while all the line of business apps developed internally by the business technology teams (Trading, Risk, development tooling) primarily target Chrome and those teams prefer Linux as their back-end platform of choice.
MS have been trying really hard to compete with Chrome. Edge was a genuine, all-in effort to win back the desktop browser space on Windows. A primary reason it failed was precisely because so many enterprises had already had to put Chrome everywhere and developed scads of enterprise web apps that relied on Chrome and FF. It was too late. Our IT department tried really hard to push Edge when it came out, but everyone in the business technology teams just went "Meh, Sucks" and carried on using Chrome and Firefox as much as possible.
It seems to me that many people think in the short term. "They got away with it for years" is the same as "they got away with it" to them.
Microsoft is definitely paying for their hubris now... Or at least, they were. It seems that they've managed to offset that enough that people respect them again.
To me, they will always be that company that decided to just bulldoze everyone else and force their way on everyone. That doesn't mean I don't use their products. But it does mean I always look for alternatives.
Having said that, there are precious few companies out there that I don't feel that way about now. I'm struggling to come up with any that aren't game developers at the moment.
"What if we could unbundle the operating system? I wonder what innovations we're missing out on?"
I think the only one benefitting from that would be the middleman to test the various os:s against the zillion or so hardware platforms and combinations out there to provide at least some selection of OS that might or might not work on your device (instead of just bricking it right away).
A mobile device is not some standard hardware supporting a standard OS. A mobile device is an agglomeration standard or non-standard hardware components, and their hardware drivers, bundled with an OS that probably has been customized some way to facilitate the underlying platform.
You can't abstract the world away. OS is the level where the dirty nitty gritty details of running a hardware system are hidden away from the user.
You still need to have a platform where to install and run all the device drivers and so on..
Unbundling the OS is basically the Open Source model. So yes you can install a bare bones OS core and then slot in whatever tools, apps and services you want, but then your system is it's own special individual snowflake. The intersection of all the people using the same text editor, ftp client, mail client, desktop, window manager, browser, IM client, backup software and PDF viewer is, er, just you.
So what happens then is people come up with bundled solutions called Distros, but there are dozens of them.
On mobile the nearest equivalent are all the small time AOSP based OEMs, but even then end users are manipulated in certain ways by the default apps and app store that comes with the phone.
The idea of the OS as a super app is interesting and fits nicely with how I personally think the current AI wave will play out:
Right now everything is its own product with all the overhead that it brings with it.
Eventually, as more and more “AI” things (abstract on purpose) will be integrated on the OS level, we will have a more streamlined process for development of “smart” software products on such a OS.
I put AI and smart in quotes because with our current understanding it means ML/DL which means things like voice and pattern recognition, text summarization, perfect OCR, text/content generation, visual indexing etc.
We do know from experience that the way we interact with a typical OS, whether mobile or laptop/desktop, does not change very often. iOS was ground breaking because it put the context first. A decision that is still causing problems for power users as seen with the difficulties in becoming productive with iPads. Example:
previously: PDF Reader program to show a pdf. Can be saved to disk and sent as file via mail
now: pdf file as context passed between apps through share dialog for reading followed by mailing
What interests me quite a lot is how we might interact with an OS that will become such a ‘smart OS-like super app’ by bundling the features mentioned above.
Will they only exist as APIs for software developers to use on these systems, for ease of development?
Or will they be somehow integrated into the common end users usage of and interaction with that system?
I bet there is a lot of value in solving the latter
Haha. History of technology is littered with anecdotes like this.
Almost all big tech companies have huge graveyards of acquired software companies, some for the products, some for tech, some for people.
The targets are acquired, in-digested and slowly die. What is left is a lot of millionaires / billionaires who move on to other big things, a lot of half-baked tech / feature stuff, a lot of wasted potential.
While the trend is obvious, these types of super apps are neither desirable nor user centric.
They are hot-spots of monopolies, censorship and are front-line enemies for democracies. Especially if they include social / news / events / groups stuff.
I wish, there are more apps, bound together with integration mechanisms (loosely coupled, high cohesion) rather than one super app.
Unfortunately, the whole world is moving towards super apps. Google / Amazon / FB / Apple are all doing Commerce / Banking / Products / Entertainment / Internet Services / Cloud Computing / News & Information / Social at the same time. (There may be some exceptions, like Apple not doing commerce like Amazon)
I guess business moves in circles. There was consolidation in times of Standard Oil (or steel, I don't recall), where controlling everything in every vertical is the game, then business moved towards a more distributed services type structures, then we are witnessing another round of consolidation.
Across all sectors, this is more pronounced in US, a handful of companies directly / indirectly control huge aspects of an individuals life.
I'm in India now, and I don't see these super apps as monopolies , at least not yet. You can pay bills, recharge your mobiles and book tickets among other things using a bunch of super apps without any exclusive lock-in. The government did one good thing making a commoditized payment API enabling seamless transfer of money between services. Thus the apps compete on UX and fees and it really shows. Getting stuff done through my mobile in India is an order of magnitude less painful than anything I experienced in the US.
In India, there isn't a super app just yet although there are multiple players trying to build it.
Paytm: Alibaba has invested
PhonePe: Acquired by Walmart (along with Flipkart)
Google Pay has opened its platform to select companies to offer their services: food ordering, investment products etc
Facebook invested in India's largest telecom network Jio (owned by Reliance which is India's largest listed company) and there are indications that they are building a super app with OTT, e-commerce, grocery etc as offerings.
My understanding is that people want integration: being able to use their favorite platforms so that it's easy to share and connect data between them, and what the user already has on their device(s).
As I understand it, nowadays OS shells do provide something like that, by having a smart indexing and search tool available. A "super app" seems to be another way to provide that consolidation, but is there more to it than indexing?
A user is basically having a chat with their device. The UI is the language available for the user to form queries. The more flexible the language, the more the user may express complex queries. But users don't really want to learn a complex language, they want something either "intuitive" or matching their interests from the beginning (ie, opening up the search possibilities, or narrowing down to a usable set of targets). Because intuition is only made from analogies of accumulated knowledge, the former can only be constructed by having the app capable of understanding (possibly a subset of) the user language, which leads to Siri and the like. The later by reducing the scope of the super app to a template of interests, which could either fixed (mainstream topics), or determined from a set of existing models by having the user go through a questionnaire at app install to narrow down their interests to a manageable subset.
I think that for now the key factors are:
(1) consolidation of information, because the user doesn't want to jump through each of their accounts or data sources to find what their looking for.
(2) automatic connection of different services (banking, online markets, and perhaps many other use cases); this is only relevant for services which are not equipped with a protocol to deal with a given form of connectivity. Perhaps this is a generalization of (1).
(3) social interaction and controlled sharing of data
(4) security
Ultimately, the UI would have to become some sort of programming language to really be able to fulfill all of the users wishes, but natural languages are a poor fit for this task, and because of this the feature set of these apps will always be limited, unless somehow Siri and al learn to ask the user to be more precise when there are ambiguities (not unlike the dialogue that exists between a programmer and a compiler). Also, speaking to your app is not really a secure way of interacting with it, unless you're alone when doing it, and you never leave your device.
I don't claim to be capable of producing the software that is discussed, I'm merely stating my opinion on the topic. Most likely my view on this is skewed and not deep enough to be qualified as insightful. I feel that the work done on all these applications are already quite a feat, but I also remember seeing hard critics about Siri, Cortana and these solutions when they are quite difficult to get to the level they've reached. Yet, I also think that there is still a long way until they really become good assistants. The other way I discussed - which is these super apps - in my opinion require quite a bit of customizability to get out of the dashboard trench, but since I don't believe to have an accurate view of what they are capable of these days, you probably want to take all of that with a large grain of salt.
My Asian company have this kind of super apps as highlight product, the "hub" of everything imaginable. I hates it with the bottom of my heart.
I think super apps can be good, useful and fast if made well, but most of the time it's slow, bloat, messy, cluttered, etc. - seriously, no amount of negative adjectives can describe this kind of abomination of app. I feel bad for our users - our exe seems to like it though...I guess they never use it.
This immediately made me think of the Unix philosophy (Do one thing well and provide the right way for other tools to connect to the output or pipe in input) vs the Emacs way (Operating System within an Operating System).
If we frame it this way, I think it helps us understand better the pros and cons of each, and importantly that they appeal to different type of folks depending on their use cases.
For e.g., one of the main appeals of Emacs is that it's easier to combine functionalities across mini-tools within Emacs than in Vim. However, it also means that when building one of these mini-tools, you have to have awareness of all other mini-tools in the system, and integrate with them properly, which makes the cost of building much higher vs Vim.
One crucial difference between China and other western countries is that, China government won't try to break WeChat up in the name of antitrust or anti monopoly.
>The NSA's top-secret black budget, obtained from Snowden by The Washington Post, exposed the successes and failures of the 16 spy agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community, and revealed that the NSA was paying U.S. private tech companies for clandestine access to their communications networks.
>The NSA was shown to be secretly accessing Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR surveillance program.
These two quotes refer to different things. The first refers to PRISM, which gives the US a privileged position as it involves companies bound by US law, however, all participating companies denied it involved direct access to their data. See the quotes in the wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#I...
From the slides; it appears it works by the agencies (via the FBI DITU) sending the cooperating company a selector (e.g. email address), and then those companies sending back the actual material (e.g. emails);
From transparency reports it is clear that the receiving company can see how many selectors are coming in and how much data is being "exfiltrated" under this scheme (and it is roughly 10,000 targets).
---
The second quote refers to a program of passive surveillance which - while probably the most underhand thing revealed by Snowden - did not rely on any privileged position of the US government, and could have been pulled off by an adversarial nation as well. It didn't rely on the cooperation of those companies, and in fact they were outraged by it and implemented encryption in an attempt to thwart it.
Yes, and they can implement their digital social-credit based punishments through WeChat, e.g. controlling what the user can spend currency on through the app, what types of travel they can use, etc.
We similarly can't abandon google because they "accidentally" banned someone without any explanation. (a false positives) Trial by robot can be even more unreasonable than a dictator.
That can't really be a motivation for not breaking monopolies though, because as you point out, both China and the US have access to everyone's data. So it is reasonable to assume that China and US would have access to everyone's data if a different company was the monopoly or even if multiple different companies provided the access. From the perspective of the government, they don't care. They just require you to tell them what they want to know whenever they ask. Controlling the population via control of the population's digital activities, which often translates to control of the population's physical activities.
China is just more ruthless on the level of the market in that if you win in China, it really is winner take all. There are no controls on the market to stop monopolies forming.
It’s happened numerous times. Maybe not as much as you personally think it should. Even then however, the mere threat that it could happen is a much bigger deterrence to abusive behavior than what you have in China.
I think you're not quite hitting it on the point. WeChat itself doesn't offer or bundle any of the mini-apps or services it hosts as a platform (and then behaves anti-competitively against its competitor mini-apps).
i.e. you can order meals, order taxis, read blogs in WeChat but doesn't prioritize an "Internet Explorer" taxi company above all other results.
Sure the Tencent company invests in a whole bunch of other companies like Comcast owning The Verge etc, but that has nothing to do with super apps.
It just goes to show you that phone makers are unlikely to be the best OS makers.
Take this trend forward, a phone only has one app that a user clicks on to ‘open’ a new and better ‘operating system’ that better suits their needs.
Each of these app-‘OSs’ will be unavailable to other developers, so it becomes an arms race.
The convenient thing for China is that the CCP picks which companies will be winners and will therefore have the capital backing to compete and make the best app-OSs to get a majority of users to buy in to. They can also build in the required back doors to keep their population from getting any funny ideas.
The description of “shake” is something that I would expect to have “in the West” as well, by now, but still... nothing. Connecting to someone’s online identity when meeting or soon afterward is still somewhat awkward - either rely on old-school phone numbers, which are long and error-prone, or on names and usernames you can misspell.
I get that it’s hard to do this while respecting the more privacy-oriented sensibilities “we” have, but surely it’s not impossible. Is there anything I’m missing, like some cool app that teenagers use...? LinkedIn, for example, should absolutely add it.
Could someone explain why the guy who pointed out Bump existed and was discontinued after acquisition by Google got downvoted into oblivion, aside from the fact it was apparently more tooled for facilitating NFC file transfers?
Bump had bootstrapping problems (if I have it but you don't, it's useless), and it was also not particularly reliable at the time because of hardware quality.
To be clear: I don't think this sort of thing alone is enough to bootstrap on its own in a market with established social networks, but I don't understand why such social networks don't offer it as a feature.
Email. Or take a photo of a QR code, or take a photo of the email address. Or take a photo of the phone number. Or call the other one to confirm that you've typed the correct number, and the other party will be able to instantly save your number too.
I think this problem is not that big of a problem. After all, worst case, you can just hand out a paper business card.
There's rarely a need to get someone's contact details without even knowing who they are, at least their name, etc. And when we have their name and we can link them to something (a common friend, a company), we can usually find them quite easily. Or am I mistaken? Are there examples where bump/shake would be really that useful?
Awkward to spell and to remember, unless you write it right there and then and get the other to proofread it. You also get a single piece of information, not even a full name.
> QR code
Pretty uncommon where I live (Northern UK), particularly outside geeky circles.
> take a photo of the email address
This is occasionally done but it's annoying (you have to transcribe it later) and again is unlikely to carry any other data like the guy's name.
> Or call the other one to confirm that you've typed the correct number
It takes time out of the conversation to proofread the contact name as you save it, and you're then lacking email - yeah you can get it with a phone call, which is already pretty awkward ("can I call you to send you an email to organise a call"), and again spelling an email over the phone is pretty bad and error-prone.
> worst case, you can just hand out a paper business card.
That's what I do, but apart from the environmental impact, you then have to print and store a bunch of cards and every time you change job it takes weeks (or months) to get new ones (and cringe at their design).
Dunno, maybe I'm more sensitive to this because my name is difficult to spell for English people, but I do wish I could avoid having to drag with me stacks of thick paper.
> Are there examples where bump/shake would be really that useful?
Trade shows, sales events, all the way to going to a bar and it turns out some guy is a decorator you might call on.
> Trade shows, sales events, all the way to going to a bar and it turns out some guy is a decorator you might call on.
Hm, in my experience for sales stuff you need a card. There's no real way around it. And that's only halfway there, the real thing is when you make the other party take a picture of the card, or .. if you ask their email and send them a hello with your signature containing your info. (Yes, it's awkward, seems dumb, but works exactly because the effort the other party put into it. Just taking a card and putting it next to the other taken cards is just a one-way stop-shop to a dead lead - IMHO.)
Decorator guy? Just type it into your phone. Or send yourself an email with call decorator guy, Tim, [number]. or something.
Sure, maybe there will be some amazing system/solution/app that does this. (Technically it's easy. For example you can just fire up a Bluetooth BLE beacon - eg. a Eddystone URL one. You can switch broadcasting on/off with a toggle. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.alea.beaco... And others can scan for them easily.) But it seems to me the biggest hurdle is simply that people don't want that. They want maximal certainty that they get the info from the person they are actually talking to. (NFC could help with that.)
... and let's say a trade show can start with everyone setting up their contact app. And I think some already do this. (Some already hand out name tags after all.)
> for sales stuff you need a card. [...] And that's only halfway there
That's precisely my point. At the moment that interaction is all half-broken and unreliable, it takes time, it's awkward and error-prone (the bar is loud, the sun is shining, whatever). If we could just whip out a phone and do something quick like shaking it at each other, we'd all be better off. I agree that NFC is likely the way forward for this.
The problem is, whatever tech we come up with, it'll need a "social protocol" (just as every cryptosystem needs a human element and it has to be factored in during security analysis). And right now you can just give your phone to Decorator Tim with his/her name prefilled and with no numbers, and Tim will likely just type their number. Yeey, success! Sure it would be easier to just wave your phone, show a "contact request" logo/hand-sign, but we're not there yet.
And exactly because bars are loud, but garden parties are too sunny that we would need a very generic/adaptive solution. Currently it's simply solved by raw human wetware processing power, ingenuity and foresight (eg. in case of business cards).
Yes, I think NFC is perfect for contacts, but it needs the social dance too. (Exactly because of the edge cases as in how do you easily accept/reject it if you can't see the screen?)
This seems like one of those things that sounds nice, but isn't special enough to supplant the existing good-enough-for-most-people methods that are already must more entrenched (phone #, email, in-app QR codes come to mind first). Especially since there isn't a single "online identity" for most people in the US, and as you mention sharing selectively is arguably a feature, not a bug.
There are lots of examples of "good enough" stuff preventing adoption of newer tech across the world. I see stuff like the weird US checking account clearance system in this bucket - it would be really expensive to replace, so despite there being newer, better systems elsewhere, it's seen as "good enough" - or the relatively slow uptake of electronic payment in Japan even as cash-based vending machines were far more ubiquitous than elsewhere. That's a lot of infrastructure to upgrade, so advantages have to be extreme, not just present.
Isn't "shake" described as a way to meet strangers who move their phone's in a specific way? How do people use this to connect to each other online after meeting in person?
I live in Mexico and recently discovered Rappi. It has delivery from the pharmacy, AND restaurant delivery, AND grocery delivery. And live events (which I don't know how that works). And some other stuff that is not available in this area.
I think I tried to get Instacart to work before and I don't think they have it here. So when I found out that the app which I already entered my credit card into for ordering take-out has grocery delivery also, I was pretty happy.
But not having to enter my credit card or do a verification again is pretty convenient. And like I said a lot of US apps aren't available here. So I think Rappi is great. When it works.
I mean, just to clarify Rappi runs like a piece of shit on my phone, sometimes completely freezes, sometimes does not deliver important chat messages, does not seem to have tracking for users, has few restaurants compared to Uber Eats, and the grocery inventory seems to be totally out of date.
However, it's the only one I know of for grocery delivery. And I know that Uber Eats is screwing over restaurants so I would love to order through Rappi. If they can make it slightly less shitty then I would be happy to use it more. It's sort of like an Amazon for delivery.
It's interesting that they say there's "nothing like it in the rest of the world" while KakaoTalk has incredible usage numbers in Korea, with a similar number of capabilities. You can do banking, ride hailing, messaging, and even more... plus the characters from stickers/emoji are cultural icons in and of themselves.
I think you're referring to where I quoted Ben Thompson, but he was speaking in a specific sense: that there it nothing like WeChat in the sense of being an OS for an entire nation (not simply being a super app). More context around the quote is here: https://stratechery.com/2017/apples-china-problem/
The quote is indeed a bit dated though, I'll grant that -- is KakaoTalk that dominant in SK now?
super apps == late 80's, early 90's walled gardens (AOL, compuserve, GEnie, et al). It will be interesting to see if the same forces that led to the downfall of walled gardens also effect super apps. I think two key variables are the 1) diversity of user tasks / needs 2) amount of interop needed between services.
If it's a large number of tasks with low interop needed, I think these will give way to unbundled open web / app marketplace style platforms. If users in these markets have concentrated needs with high degree of interoperability between them, then I think they will persist.
I created https://stockevents.app a few months ago and it's currently undergoing a similar development.
It started of as an app for one use case (events around stocks), but due to customer requests I'm expanding the use cases to many more areas around finance. So I guess in some time it will be a super app for finance.
With each use case I added so far, the conversion rate, in app time and downloads increased.
The key to it all it to keep it simple I guess and help users configure the app so that they only see what they want.
WeChat feels like an odd thing to try to copy, because you can't copy the Chinese government. They directly keep out foreign competition like Facebook, and it's difficult for any small company to deal with the censorship issue.
You're much more likely to have some small scrappy startup steal all your users elsewhere.
Good god in every other thread there is the standard propaganda about the "CCP".
> They directly keep out foreign competition like Facebook
As opposed to huwaei that's welcomed with open arms in the US? Lots of countries keep out foreign competition to protect their own industries. It's the smart thing to do. We actually pioneered it in the 1800s.
So you can copy the chinese government. Not only that, the chinese government copied the US, germany, japan, korea, etc. Protectionism is how every major economic power became a major economic power. Airbus wouldn't exist if it weren't for EU copying "the chinese government".
I never stated an opinion on the policies, and you don't seem to be saying I'm wrong. I have to wonder how anyone can say anything positive about China, if even accurate descriptions are "propaganda".
If you actually want to help China's reputation I'd also advise skipping the whataboutism.
> I never stated an opinion on the policies, and you don't seem to be saying I'm wrong.
I'm clearly saying you are wrong with examples and sources.
> I have to wonder how anyone can say anything positive about China, if even accurate descriptions are "propaganda".
You can say positive and negative things about every country. China isn't an exception regardless of your agenda. It's bizarre that anyone would even write "wonder how anyone can say anything positive about China".
Well how about this? Their economic growth? Their impressive poverty reduction? Their infrastructure build-up?
> If you actually want to help China's reputation I'd also advise skipping the whataboutism.
It's not "whataboutism" to directly refute your claim : "because you can't copy the Chinese government." + "They directly keep out foreign competition like Facebook".
You certainly see the difference between whataboutism and a refutation with examples right?
And I'm not here to help China's reputation because I don't have an agenda like you. I'm here to refute nonsense and bullshit propaganda.
A single super-platform has the benefit of integrating several functions in a nice package. But while accumulating more functionality at some point it becomes too bloated, innovation slows down, it's a big ball of mud able to do everything, but also bad at everything, at which point it is outpaced left and right by small speedboats specialized on single functions, highly innovative, but with less tight coupling between them. This leaves more burden on the user to integrate them, but at some point the qualitative difference between the big ball of mud and the individual tools is so big that users will gladly do this integrative work if they can then enjoy better solutions...until the individually-constructed "big ball of muds" made out of haphazard integrations of many individual solutions become convoluted enough again for someone to "professionally" integrate some of these functions at the current level of quality into a new "super platform", and the cycle starts anew.
Isn't a large part of the success of duplicate apps in china due to the great firewall preventing outside tech from suceeding in chinese markets? Baidu is just a worse google, alibaba is a worse amazon, list goes on, I'm sure I could find ten more.
To the people anonymously downvoting, that was a question. Is it or is it not? Are we going to discuss or are we just going to downvote anyone behind the security of our screens just because I’m saying something you don’t like? The great firewall exists. China has a track record of duping products, not upholding copyrights, and manipulating their markets. They are trying to passive aggressively win an economic and cyber war, and if you want to pretend it’s not the case then and pretend we are all playing by fair rules and continue to preach fairness when there is clearly a bad actor and continue to let the bad actor get away with it then we will all be worse off for it.
This is the normal business model in much of Asia. Large, tightly knit, near monopolistic, corporations operate over many sectors. Classic example are Zaibatsu of old and Keiretsu of today. Is it any surprise that the same business approach is used in software?
I find it fascinating how we can sort of up-scale things but never without adding something weird that no one wants. Often there are competing formulas that have us compare the drawbacks rather than the qualities. (The funniest to me are monasteries running some kind of business. They have a management level above the suits (so to speak) made up out of monks who care only about quality.)
Something that increasingly puzzles me are the implications of having links in a chain that either do not care if things work or not or are able to pressure the rest into obedience though lack of skin in the game. They may seem the least significant but have the most leverage.
I still believe it's because of an original intuition everybody has : more is better. It actually takes a lot of time and (collective) experience to accept that 'less' is actually more. "emerging" markets will probably get there too, with a bit of time.
Chromebooks are less than comparable laptops that came before it. iPads are less than laptops that came before it. The iPhone SE 2 is less than the iPhone 11 which came before it. The MacBook was less than the MacBook Air which came before it which is less than the MacBook Pro that came before it.
This also makes me feel like there is not much innovation happening, but rather just copycat playbooks in different marketplaces or niches. It's a missed opportunity because different markets can inspire different solutions or focus on different problems, but not if the cheapest and lowest risk path is to do the same thing everyone else has.
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- There is no single Play Store equivalent, so the barrier to make people install a relatively unknown app is higher.
- Phones do not come with Google Services Framework, so the barrier to develop a networked app is higher.
- Just like everywhere else, people will use whatever is available because a suboptimal solution is still better than opting out completely from the benefits these solutions bring.
I don't think in China specifically it's about low-end devices or data cost at all. South East Asia - perhaps, but all in all the situation reflects the structure of the economies (the prevalence of monopolistic conglomerates with a finger in every pie).
Most of the time the most widespread solution is far from excellent because it only has to be better than the competition. Even more so when competition is limited by entry barriers to the point it hardly exists. So while the article is a good summary of the situation, it ends up being a bit like wondering why people use Windows.
Android is already one abstraction layer on top of another, there is no intrinsic technological benefit of adding yet another one OS-like super app on top of it, or at the very least any such benefits remain to be demonstrated.