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Asian and African super apps are following the playbook WeChat originated

217 points by thought 6y ago

davidkuennen 6y ago
I created https://stockevents.app 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.
- TechticSolution 6y ago
  Congratulation for your new venture.
  - davidkuennen 6y ago
    Thank you. It's a lot of fun developing this.
1cvmask 6y ago
"Super apps" are just bundlers. 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.” https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundling-and-unbundling https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli... Here is another presentation on "super apps" by Connie Chan of A16Z: https://a16z.com/2020/01/23/four-trends-in-consumer-tech/ https://a16z.com/2020/01/23/four-trends-in-consumer-tech/ 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)
- zxcmx 6y ago
  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.
  - Ensorceled 6y ago
    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"
    - pydry 6y ago
      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.
      - simonh 6y ago
        >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.
        6y ago
sevencolors 6y ago
Hey it worked for AOL ... for a while
- im3w1l 6y ago
  Any theory on why it works for a while?
  - Slartie 6y ago
    It's a pendulum. It swings. 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.
digisset 6y ago
Great write-up of WeChat's history here. So Tencent (now as big as Facebook market-cap wise) owes a large part of its success to an acquihire? Impressive.
jowler 6y ago
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?
bsaul 6y ago
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.
- brainless 6y ago
  More is evidently better. Which new iPhone or XLaptop gives you less? Or focuses? "Less is more" is just talk of company that want to not grow into monopolies and I support that view. But users do not. Outside of software each global conglomerate is the exact opposite of "less is more".
  - freehunter 6y ago
    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.
nsoonhui 6y ago
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.
- modo_mario 6y ago
  As if this happens in the West nowadays?
  - malandrew 6y ago
    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.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Is that because China's government has direct access to the data in WeChat? I mean the US government has that as well with Google and FB and co (see Snowden revelations), but apparently not as much as they'd like.
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    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. Political enemies will have a rough life there.
    - 6510 6y ago
      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.
  - bilbo0s 6y ago
    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.
toyg 6y ago
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.
- john_miller 6y ago
  It existed, but was shut down after the company was acquired by google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application)
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > LinkedIn, for example, should absolutely add it Did they try a digital business card that went nowhere?
  - toyg 6y ago
    If they did, I didn't even see it. I am a heavy business-card user, and I still lack a good app to do that with my phone - which seems silly.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  "Shake"? You mean "bump" don't you? This has been tried numerous times before ... https://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/23/5-mobile-apps-that-could-kill-business-cards/ https://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/23/5-mobile-apps-that-co...
  - toyg 6y ago
    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.
kosmischemusik 6y ago
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.
4cao 6y ago
In China: - 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.
- swiley 6y ago
  > - 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.
  - duxup 6y ago
    f-droid is a horrible experience though IMO. 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.
    - swiley 6y ago
      >f-droid is a horrible experience though IMO 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.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
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.
jbverschoor 6y ago
It's simple.. You have automatic: authentication, payments, linked messages and everything. AND you don't have to download anything. So all the usual crap is available, and you can simply use the application part of an app. luckily apple will also provide app-snippets.. Unfortunately, authentication is still not fixed
waltpad 6y ago
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.
- waltpad 6y ago
  Perhaps a few precisions: 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.
danesparza 6y ago
This is not a good road for anybody to go down. It's been done before. My primary example is the behemoth that is CA technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies They started acquiring software in the 1980's. Software that would be reasonably good would go to CA to die an awful and slow death. They're still around. They don't own a single piece of groundbreaking software, but they still make money.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  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.
- oarabbus_ 6y ago
  >This is not a good road for anybody to go down. On the contrary, it seems that WeChat has been wildly successful in China.
kumarvvr 6y ago
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. Unfortunate.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  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.
cwxm 6y ago
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.
Fauntleroy 6y ago
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.
- thought 6y ago
  Hi, author here. I'm a fan of KakaoTalk and I specifically include them in the visual: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F41c6ff46-c8bb-467b-9f6d-446ffb6a9ba6_1012x506.png https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q... 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/ 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?
jpadkins 6y ago
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.
throwawaysea 6y ago
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.
raindropm 6y ago
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.
bsanr 6y ago
So, a tangential query: have we already lost Africa to the Asian sphere of influence?
RedBeetDeadpool 6y ago
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.
- RedBeetDeadpool 6y ago
  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.
6510 6y ago
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.
ilaksh 6y ago
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.
nitwit005 6y ago
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.
- dntbnmpls 6y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St... 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".
  - nitwit005 6y ago
    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.
    - dntbnmpls 6y ago
      > 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.

217 points by thought 6y ago

I created https://stockevents.app 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.

TechticSolution 6y ago
Congratulation for your new venture.
- davidkuennen 6y ago
  Thank you. It's a lot of fun developing this.

1cvmask 6y ago

"Super apps" are just bundlers. 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.” https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundling-and-unbundling https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli... Here is another presentation on "super apps" by Connie Chan of A16Z: https://a16z.com/2020/01/23/four-trends-in-consumer-tech/ https://a16z.com/2020/01/23/four-trends-in-consumer-tech/ 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)

zxcmx 6y ago
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.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  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"
  - pydry 6y ago
    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.
    - simonh 6y ago
      >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.
      - 6y ago

sevencolors 6y ago

Hey it worked for AOL ... for a while

im3w1l 6y ago
Any theory on why it works for a while?
- Slartie 6y ago
  It's a pendulum. It swings. 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.

digisset 6y ago

Great write-up of WeChat's history here. So Tencent (now as big as Facebook market-cap wise) owes a large part of its success to an acquihire? Impressive.

jowler 6y ago

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?

bsaul 6y ago

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.

brainless 6y ago
More is evidently better. Which new iPhone or XLaptop gives you less? Or focuses? "Less is more" is just talk of company that want to not grow into monopolies and I support that view. But users do not. Outside of software each global conglomerate is the exact opposite of "less is more".
- freehunter 6y ago
  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.

nsoonhui 6y ago

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.

modo_mario 6y ago
As if this happens in the West nowadays?
- malandrew 6y ago
  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.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Is that because China's government has direct access to the data in WeChat? I mean the US government has that as well with Google and FB and co (see Snowden revelations), but apparently not as much as they'd like.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  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. Political enemies will have a rough life there.
  - 6510 6y ago
    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.
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  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.

toyg 6y ago

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.

john_miller 6y ago
It existed, but was shut down after the company was acquired by google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application)
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> LinkedIn, for example, should absolutely add it Did they try a digital business card that went nowhere?
- toyg 6y ago
  If they did, I didn't even see it. I am a heavy business-card user, and I still lack a good app to do that with my phone - which seems silly.
Ensorceled 6y ago
"Shake"? You mean "bump" don't you? This has been tried numerous times before ... https://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/23/5-mobile-apps-that-could-kill-business-cards/ https://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/23/5-mobile-apps-that-co...
- toyg 6y ago
  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.

kosmischemusik 6y ago

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.

4cao 6y ago

In China: - 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.

swiley 6y ago
> - 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.
- duxup 6y ago
  f-droid is a horrible experience though IMO. 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.
  - swiley 6y ago
    >f-droid is a horrible experience though IMO 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.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

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.

jbverschoor 6y ago

It's simple.. You have automatic: authentication, payments, linked messages and everything. AND you don't have to download anything. So all the usual crap is available, and you can simply use the application part of an app. luckily apple will also provide app-snippets.. Unfortunately, authentication is still not fixed

waltpad 6y ago

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.

waltpad 6y ago
Perhaps a few precisions: 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.

danesparza 6y ago

This is not a good road for anybody to go down. It's been done before. My primary example is the behemoth that is CA technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies They started acquiring software in the 1980's. Software that would be reasonably good would go to CA to die an awful and slow death. They're still around. They don't own a single piece of groundbreaking software, but they still make money.

kumarvvr 6y ago
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.
oarabbus_ 6y ago
>This is not a good road for anybody to go down. On the contrary, it seems that WeChat has been wildly successful in China.

kumarvvr 6y ago

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. Unfortunate.

ramraj07 6y ago
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.

cwxm 6y ago

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.

Fauntleroy 6y ago

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.

thought 6y ago
Hi, author here. I'm a fan of KakaoTalk and I specifically include them in the visual: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F41c6ff46-c8bb-467b-9f6d-446ffb6a9ba6_1012x506.png https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q... 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/ 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?

jpadkins 6y ago

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.

throwawaysea 6y ago

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.

raindropm 6y ago

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.

bsanr 6y ago

So, a tangential query: have we already lost Africa to the Asian sphere of influence?

RedBeetDeadpool 6y ago

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.

RedBeetDeadpool 6y ago
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.

6510 6y ago

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.

ilaksh 6y ago

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.

nitwit005 6y ago

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.

dntbnmpls 6y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St... 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".
- nitwit005 6y ago
  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.
  - dntbnmpls 6y ago
    > 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.