5 ms·
Payments. The sticky part of "everything" app is the payments platform. With a payments platform you have a internal "funded" ecosystem. Anybody who can not tak
by Veserv 2y ago
Payments. The sticky part of "everything" app is the payments platform. With a payments platform you have a internal "funded" ecosystem. Anybody who can not take payments from the "everything" app has a incentive to get inside so they can get paid. In many countries, the "everything" app contains, what in the US would be called, a bank.
This is basically illegal in the USA. US Banks are extremely stringently regulated to the point where many international banks do not even want to take US customers because that would subject them to US laws about banks. That is how insanely challenging it is for literal banks with decades of past and current experience to manage the regulations. "Move fast and break things" would get "Go directly to jail, do not pass go". Even money transmitter licenses like Paypal and Venmo are extremely challenging. And even those companies try really hard to make sure they do not get classified as a bank.
Trying to graft on a social platform onto a bank or a money transmitter would make the entire social platform subject to bank/money transmitter business restrictions which is almost certainly doomed legally. It is not like these companies do not know to add payments, it is just so insanely hard that even the 900 pound gorillas do not want to mess with Godzilla.
- orf 2y agoNope - nobody in Europe uses WhatsApp as a payments platform. Does it even have one? It succeeded because it was around at the time where SMS messages where expensive, but smart phones where exploding in popularity.
- Veserv 2y agoWhatsApp is not a "everything" platform in most of Europe. Do you open WhatsApp to play music, games, order takeout, order online, pay for rent? It is just a very popular chat application in most of Europe in contrast to a "everything" app like WeChat where you do all of those things. [1] https://www.whatsapp.com/payments/in https://www.whatsapp.com/payments/in
- orf 2y agoNope, but by that definition almost no countries have an “everything app”. There’s like, one example in a very unique market? It’s the “everything app” for messaging, friends and groups.
- dheera 2y agoIn China, WeChat supports messaging, payments, as well as: - Booking trains on the national railway - Booking flights - Booking hotels - Paying all your bills - Buying stuff - Ordering food - Renting a bike - Getting a rideshare - Seeing a doctor - Donating to charities - Investing - Reading e-books - Pretty much everything else A lot of it is done through their HTML5 "mini-app" ecosystem but it's all under one everything app.
- orf 2y agoYes, but the question was “does this exist anywhere other than in China?” China is a pretty specific and unique market. Perhaps the existence of such an “everything app” is related to that, explaining why it doesn’t exist elsewhere?
- out_of_protocol 2y agoTelegram moving in this direction very fast. At this moment, telegram is used as news, blogs, file transfer app, chat etc. Recently added miniapps with real payments integration, "stars" as internal currency
- emptysongglass 2y agoYou're getting downvoted mysteriously, as this is indeed true. All of Telegram's recent updates have been toward this purpose.
- wenc 2y agoYes, they exist elsewhere. Check out Grab (southeast Asia), Line (Japan, Taiwan), Kakao (Korea), Gojek (Indonesia), PayTm (India) or any number of everything-apps.
- Swizec 2y ago> It succeeded because it was around at the time where SMS messages where expensive, but smart phones where exploding in popularity. Not sure that’s true everywhere. In Slovenia we had unlimited texting way before we had smartphones. By around 2005 all carriers offered a “teenager” plan with unlimited texting and near zero phone minutes. Data was not yet a selling point.
- conradfr 2y agoSMS is one part of the story, group messaging is the other one.
- Yeul 2y agoWhatsApp let you send pictures. They came up with MMS but by then everyone was already on WhatsApp. Now that I think about it WhatsApp really took the country by storm- the only thing that I can compare it with was Napster and Kazaa. And just like those it was all done by word of mouth! No commercials or ads. It was all organic.
- Zak 2y agoWhatsApp appears to support payments in India, and nowhere else.
- Veserv 2y agoIndia and Brazil [1]. Only their two biggest markets [2]. [1] https://faq.whatsapp.com/1293279751500598 https://faq.whatsapp.com/1293279751500598 [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/whatsapp-users-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/whatsapp-...
- meiraleal 2y agoThe usage of the payment feature in Brazil is very, very low. I never heard about anyone using it. The Central Bank launched a national payment system (Pix) at the same time whatsapp wanted to launch their solution so they made Meta wait a few more months to get authorization. Now everybody uses Pix.
- immibis 2y agoMeanwhile no-KYC cryptocurrency exchange sites are mostly hosted by or proxied through Cloudflare, a US company.