• balsoft
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    3 hours ago

    Have you ever tried to use one of those superapps? It’s still a clunky experience overburdened with dozens of useless UI elements eating up screen estate of what I actually care about, and then whenever I wanted to do something for which there’s no sub-app in the super-app it would be difficult due to lack of integrations with “the outside”. That’s even before we question the idea of putting all the eggs functionality in one basket centralized app with one developer entity, allowing them to ultimately control all aspects of one’s online life.

    And more philosophically, I’m surprised that as a functional dev you prefer one big tightly coupled combine to a collection of small but useful on their own utilities lightly coupled to produce more than the sum of their parts.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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      3 hours ago

      There are trade offs to each approach. However, it’s clear that super app approach has won in China, and the video I linked explains why.

      And more philosophically, I’m surprised that as a functional dev you prefer one big tightly coupled combine to a collection of small but useful on their own utilities lightly coupled to produce more than the sum of their parts.

      Because it’s the opposite of that in practice. This approach decouples the UI functionality from the functionality of each individual app which becomes a plugable service. This way you can trivially build workflows that involve multiple apps and chain their functionality any way you like. Coupling the UI to the business logic of an application is a fundamentally wrong design decision in my opinion.

      Also, this doesn’t have to be done as an app. It can be done at OS level. This way apps can work following Unix philosophy where you can create pipelines involving different apps and do scripting using them the same way you can do with command line utils. I’m surprised that a dev would have trouble understanding the benefits of doing this.