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Honestly, a chat app that 1 billion+ use per month that includes payments, camera effects, extensive social integrations, stories, GIFs, reactions, games, polls
by lwb 7y ago
Honestly, a chat app that 1 billion+ use per month that includes payments, camera effects, extensive social integrations, stories, GIFs, reactions, games, polls, voice recording, calling, video chat, and works across all mobile platforms, with nine years of technical debt, that thousands of developers build simultaneously seems WAY more complicated to me than any of your examples.
Messenger may not have "HN clout" but the devs who work on it are having some of the greatest software impact in the world.
- _bxg1 7y ago> that includes payments, camera effects, extensive social integrations, stories, GIFs, reactions, games, polls, voice recording, calling, video chat To be fair, this is part of the problem ^
- derefr 7y agoIt's an inner-platform effect, certainly, but not one FB asked for. If they were allowed by the app-stores to factor their app into separate "plugins" that were auto-installed when a friend used them in a chat, the way iMessage does, they'd probably do that. But they're not allowed to have their own seamless plugin ecosystem, so into the monolith everything goes.
- _bxg1 7y agoNo, they specifically used Messenger as a way of pushing all of those different things on its massive install-base. Anything that distances them from the user in any way would compromise on that objective.
- dmos62 7y agoFacebook and all the rest benefit from developing closed ecosystems that others can't benefit from. It's not a coincidence that their systems are systems-within-systems.
- threeseed 7y agoJust because there are features that you don't use doesn't make it a problem. In fact people who like stories and camera effects likely way outnumber the people that don't.
- jkmcf 7y agoI interpreted “problem” as the bloat problem in a 1.7 mloc chat app. Summarizing it as a chat app is probably the first miscommunication here.
- Aeolun 7y agoI strongly doubt that. The number of people in my list of friends (400ish) that use stories is marginal. The number of people that use camera effects as anything other than a gimmick is even smaller. Maybe a different age group?
- golergka 7y ago> my list of friends I think that most of people of HN have friend groups which are wildly unrepresentative of world population at large. We're talking not even an average US or European citizen here - we're talking 1+ billion. People from developing countries who very often access internet only from a smartphone (they don't own a computer) and who almost don't visit plain http websites outside of the few social apps. It's a completely different world out there.
- nitwit005 7y agoIf raw complexity was the fundamental issue, trimming it down to a quarter of the previous size wouldn't have been possible. Some of the problems outlined, like having 40 different views of contacts, with unique code, seem like fairly clear organizational problems.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoI'm on both sides of the fence on this one. On the one hand, it's people underestimating how much features are in the app that they've never seen, used or heard of. On the other, if that is the case then is their presence defensible? I wonder if they could make apps more modular, and only load the binaries for e.g. payments on demand. I know Apple offers a system that does that for content chunks (e.g. levels and assets in games), and in a web-based application (e.g. react native) they could use bundling to remove it from the initial download.
- aungmyohtet 7y agoBut the chat app is only the client side, not the whole app entirely in itself. If we consider the lines of code in server side, there will be a lot more lines code.