- cross-posted to:
- funny@lemmygrad.ml
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I don’t believe that super apps are inherently good, especially mobile ones. Why does your payment app also need to message, view maps, book doctor appoinments, order stuff online and more? Who cares if another app opens when you click on a google maps link. Pressing the back button will bring you back to the messenger app, or to the messenger ‘window’ in the super app. So no real changes, but the super apps tend to have clustered UIs
Wow, a “one app for everything” model, how horribly inconvenient and obnoxious!
I would much rather download multiple apps on my phone, each from a tech company that has a monopoly on their pertinent share of the market. Although this may be inconvenient to some who have a disdain for American freedom and enterprise, I will not be shaken by CCP propaganda or anything that might shake the country I hold dear!!! #RESIST #HARRIS2028
libs were trying to tell me exactly this completely unironically here https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6805581
Damn lemmy is a completely different world sometimes lol
reddit instances like .world and .ee are really something
Not sure what’s the point here, do you prefer to have one private company providing you everything over multiple companies?
The name “super app” alone terrifies me. I’m explicitly avoiding apps from private companies that are not privacy friendly, so I really don’t get why I would like something like wechat.
the CIA already controls everything. all you’re getting is illusion of privacy
XWeChat, the everything appOwned by Tencent, the most successful company in the world that enshittifies everything it touches.
Not at all. People were happy with how they were hands off with path of exile
I really wish I could find the video for it, but:
Bill Hicks on the theft of his material by Denis Leary: "I have a scoop for you. I stole his act…I camouflaged it with punchlines. And to really throw people off, I did it before he did.”
Bill was great, RIP.
We already have super apps, they’re called Android and iOS.
Countries developed super app ecosystems because poorly localized software meant you can’t just install whatever you want off the app store and expect it to be in a language you know, able to work with your phone carrier, and able to work with your payment provider.
It’s about integration, the amount of actions it takes to do something in a single app is vastly reduced compared to having to juggle multiple apps. For example, you want to go out for food with your friends. With WeChat, you can message your friends, find a restaurant on the map, book it, etc. all completely seamlessly. This is a really good video explaining the benefits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSMFnJnY7EA
WeChat is the equivalent of emacs. I think people underestimate the advantages of super apps and their greater seamlessness compared to multiple disparate apps (which (often, but not always) give a disconnected, heteronormative, clunky experience) in an operating system.
This video/text (also this video/text) explains about emacs’s advantages of integration and how it improves users’ tech sovereignty/autonomy well. WeChat and emacs have sums that are greater than their parts, and their gestalt form provide a more optimal experience than most gestalt forms of separate and disparate apps that don’t share a common language to communicate to each other.
As you mentioned in another comment in this thread, an operating system can fulfill this role, too. Linux and GNU coreutils, for example, can provide a similar experience to emacs as they are developed in a more homogeneous and cohesive manner and they use Linux as an integrated, uniform workspace, calling on APIs of the same “language”.
Apps developed in privatized settings tend to venture off and create their own UIs and APIs that don’t work optimally with other private apps. Optimal experiences that WeChat, emacs, Linux, BSD, and the like create result from a collective effort where developers cooperate together and develop a cohesive environment. This is why a socialist society and governments in general create the wonders and innovations of civilization, whereas private companies simply piggyback off of those innovations which make their own products possible in the first place.
Yeah, that’s a good analogy.
They’re basically multiple apps built in to one. I don’t see how there would be an experience difference between going to your home’s phone screen to open a different app vs going to the super-app’s home screen to open a different sub-app.
Like it’s literally just replicating the functionality of the phone’s OS but in a single app. The only possible difference I can see is that the sub-apps are more tightly integrated with one another, but the same is basically true for apps from the phone/OS maker (I’m mainly thinking Apple here since that’s what I have, but I’m sure Android has similar with its built-in apps).
The “4 apps” example is pretty wrong. You can pay someone directly in the iMessage app with Apple Pay, then order from whatever other app (also paying using Apple Pay). They included “your mobile wallet needs to be updated” as if that’s something you have to do every day just to pad the number of apps. In reality it’s two apps, iMessage and the food ordering app. In WeChat it’s probably the same, the messaging sub-app which probably also has the ability to pay someone directly, and the food ordering sub-app. (Although in both situations it would be more efficient for the boss to make the order and just have you pick it up.)
Apple Maps (and I’m sure Google Maps too) also has the ability to compare prices among ride share apps and go directly to the book screen of those apps like she said for Gaode Maps. It can also take you to a restaurant’s page on a food delivery app.
Also, what she says at 3:03 is a pretty bad thing. In the US in most places you can pay with cash, card, and your phone’s built in tap to pay. Everywhere else is just cash and card because they haven’t modernized (or just cash because they’re stingy about paying card processing fees). Being able to pay with cash anywhere is pretty important imo for multiple reasons, privacy being a big one.
On standard Android:
I’m chatting with my wife on FB messager. She sends a link to a restaurant I should check out. It opens in FB messenger html wrap-around thingy. I click the 3 dots. Tell it to open in the normal browser because it sucks in the FB messenger thing. It goes to the webpage and I can see the menu. I want to know where it is. I click the link for the map, then click the map to open in Google Maps so I can see where it is. I agree to new user Terms of Service. Now I can see the location. Cool, I can look at reviews, too. Nice. I go to book a reservation which means I need to open back the webpage. It tells me I have to download an app for that so I do that and set up an account and do that to book at this one restaurant because there are about 6 of these kinds of services and there is no telling which restaurant uses which one. Nice, it’s all set. Then I open yet another app to get a ride-share and agree to their new terms of service (love how this seems to happen once a month in each app in the west). Now I can go eat at the restaurant. They take cash or credit but no apple pay/ samsung pay / google pay. Awesome.
So yeah, pretty much the same experience you get in China, I can see where they are 1:1.
EDIT: I have 3 different parking apps on my phone because there is no single one in my city. Depending on where you park it’s a different fucking app. I got to the next city over for something? Cool, download a new fucking parking app.
> Using Facebook
Well there’s your problem.
Instead, your wife can send you the Google Maps link that automatically opens the Google Maps app where you can see reviews, reserve the table and find a convenient shortcut to the ridesharing app. I rarely see terms of service updates.
because there are about 6 of these kinds of services and there is no telling which restaurant uses which one
The same could easily apply in China. Does this restaurant have reservations set up with WeChat? Or do you have to switch to AliPay or something else for it? That’s not a problem solved by super-apps, it’s a problem solved by the maps app (or maps sub-app in the super-app) working with more restaurants. Also, for both reservations and parking, we’re basically talking about which country has a larger monopoly on those services. The fact that you need 3 different parking apps means your city doesn’t having a single parking monopoly.
“Well you are using westernapp, there’s your problem!”
Big brained reply moment.
Look, the point is Google reservation don’t work at all these restaurants. It depends on the restaurant and which of the 6 different app/services they use. You say the same could apply to China and yet your solution is the same for the Chinese apps. Additionally, China could regulate it so all vendors have to be able to use any of these 2 or three apps and could force them all to API integrate with each other. In fact, I would not be surprised to see such a thing in coming years there. Will never happen here.
But keep coping, brother.
“Well you are using westernapp, there’s your problem”
I mean Facebook specifically. It’s shit at everything.
You say the same could apply to China and yet your solution is the same for the Chinese apps.
Yeah, because my point is that there’s no difference between a super-app and a tightly integrated phone OS or set of apps for these kinds of things.
Additionally, China could regulate it so all vendors have to be able to use any of these 2 or three apps and could force them all to API integrate with each other. In fact, I would not be surprised to see such a thing in coming years there.
Are they working on that law right now? What has changed recently that makes that more likely than 5-10 years ago?
Interpreting that as requiring open APIs, obviously more open APIs would very much help with that kind of integration, but right now it seems like it’s all based on the creator of the ecosystem (Apple, Google, Tencent, Alibaba) working with individual establishments or more specific apps to offer as much as possible. I’m sure restaurants have a similar process to get fully integrated in Apple or Google Maps as they do to get fully integrated into WeChat or Alipay. The main difference I can see there is the number of restaurants working with those ecosystems, which has nothing to do with whether the ecosystem is a super-app or a set of apps built into an OS.
Interpreting it as requiring restaurants and such to work specifically with WeChat and/or Alipay, that just sounds like granting a legal monopoly/duopoly to those couple of companies. If it were state run that might be great, but Tencent and Alibaba aren’t state run.
Oh look, the
debate style of quoting things line by line and blasting out a paragraph for each thing. How embarrassing for you. Cope harder, westoid.
Using Facebook
Yeah I agree that is the problem, you should do that stuff with Wechat instead
The key difference is in the architecture. With the traditional approach, each app is a self contained unit of functionality that slaps its own UI on top. You interact with one app to do one thing, then you have to switch to another to do another, and so on. Crucially, they don’t have any shared context and it’s not possible to compose functionality from different apps together in a meaningful way.
With the WeChat approach, you have a single UI framework, and apps are effectively services that plug into it. Now it’s possible to have a shared context that spans multiple apps, and to pull their functionality into it. It basically facilitates creating workflows that involve multiple apps where each app is a component of the workflow. It’s a similar idea to the way Unix philosophy works where you have a bunch of command line utils and you can pipe data through them in a script composing their individual functionality.
This doesn’t have to be done using a mega app like WeChat, you could bake that into the OS itself, and I think it would actually be a very good architecture to do that. I think that the approach of coupling the UI to the business logic is the wrong way to go. It’s much better to decouple these things, and allow the user to create whatever workflow they want that fits their particular use case leveraging functionality provided by different apps.
Crucially, they don’t have any shared context
you could bake that into the OS itself, and I think it would actually be a very good architecture to do that
Right, I mentioned that you can do this at the OS level in my comment. However, the way iOS does it is not general, it’s something devs have to do on case by case basis. What I’m talking about is the decoupling of the UI from the logic being the default. The OS can present a single unified UI to the user, and the apps just provide service functionality. The app can then add a default view for itself, but the user could adapt it any way they wanted.
I’m not sure I fully understand. Having a pre-made UI would limit what functionality could be implemented. And it sounds like the OS developer making 90% of an app then just letting third parties plug in their back end. Like a white label kind of thing? Or do you mean something more like UIKit/SwiftUI?
No more than the GUI toolkit that the OS already provides. You’d just build UIs like you normally do, and then specify the endpoints that the widgets connect to for the data. The key here is that all apps should be forced to explicitly provide an API layer that the UI component talks to, and that anything you as the user want should be able to talk to that API.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
there’s 18 super apps… we should conglomerate them all into one app and sweep the market.
there’s 19 super apps…
The joke is this ‘super app’ would require SV companies cooperating
I would be joyous if the US is forced to accept losing its power as the world hegemon and has to be helped with reindustrializing itself by China’s aid and to use their apps. I seriously doubt this is how events will play out, and I believe the future will be messy, but it would be nice and satisfying punch to the ruling class and tech oligarchs/chuds’ comically large ego.
We-chat = Bad
🥱
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
