Super Apps Are Terrible for People—and Great for Companies
Super Apps Are Terrible for People—and Great for Companies
Apps that offer to "do it all" will subject users to even more exploitation and surveillance, while large tech companies profit.
Apps that offer to "do it all" will subject users to even more exploitation and surveillance, while large tech companies profit.
Maybe the "do one thing and do it well" paradigm was not a bad idea after all.
63And if you make the apps composable then you get all the benefits of an everything app and still have the benefits of competition and specialization. Unfortunately even apps built on open protocols fall on the trap of trying to do everything on their own (look at how Mastodon implemented DMs in the worst possible way instead of delegating it to a chat app and how people keep requesting video hosting on Lemmy).
23Mastodon do not have chats and DMs are just a side effect of selecting post visibilty. Thankfully, I much prefer just creating a link to proper chat in bio.
3
Was just about to comment the same thing. Unix philosophy should be taught in schools. Every high schooler that doesn't experience education-induced gag reflex when they see Windows is failed by the system.
13I think the issue is that on mobile especially, switching contexts between apps is incredibly difficult compared to desktop and as such it's easier for one app maker to include everything so it can contest switch more easily. The "share" mechanisms on Android and iOS are great for the common use cases but harder for more nuanced things.
That and keeping you within their ecosystem drives engagement which increases profit.
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I dont understand the obsession with grouping everything in one place. Like I know why companies do it because the current philosophy is to have you eternally in their ecosystem and to never leave their site/app or do anything else and continue to monitor.
I just dont understand why people would buy into such nonsense. Like why would I want to have my wallet and money tied into a damn chat app. Why would I want to use a chat app to hail a cab and go shopping? It'd be better to have multiple services that do the one thing well rather than 100.
34Sounds exactly like when cameras started being added on phones. There was a lot of people complaining as well.
I guess half of it is not having the foresight to see it’s potential.
8There's a difference between having a camera on your phone and having all of your services tied to one account. Once a picture is taken, you can do anything you want to it and there are any number of apps and services to help you do that. But if megaservice decides you violated some term of service, whether you actually did or not, you stand to lose everything -- your email, calendar, wallet, messages, and access to any service that used megaservice for authentication.
16Bundling things together is good when it reduces friction for the consumer, but bad when it reduces choice for the consumer. Every decision about bundling needs to be understood from that perspective, and evaluated on a case by case basis against that tradeoff.
That loss of choice is especially anti-consumer when a provider leverages a dominant market position in one product to push their own inferior version of a totally different product. For example, right now there's a competition for consumer cloud storage. But none of the providers are actually competing on cloud storage features or pricing. All of them are competing based on bundling with the other totally unrelated products provided by that competitor:
- Apple pushes iCloud by giving it first party advantage on all Apple devices, with system and OS integration that the other cloud providers aren't allowed to match.
- Google pushes Google Drive by using that storage space as part of the quota for Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Workspace.
- Microsoft pushes OneDrive as an add-on to its dominant position in Microsoft Office and Exchange, and gives it first party integration into Windows.
- Adobe pushes Adobe Cloud as an add-on to its dominant position in its suite of apps
- Amazon gives cloud storage to people who subscribe to, like, 2-day shipping and a TV streaming service and discounts at Whole Foods, in what is probably the most absurd bundle of them all.
And you see it everywhere. YouTube tries to protect its inferior Music service by bundling it with ad-free videos, Samsung put the inferior Bixby assistant on its phones, Google uses its dominance in browser, search, and maps to protect its advertising business, Apple gives its credit card preferential treatment in its payment app, etc.
So when a service protects its own affiliated service through unfair/preferential treatment, it harms the consumer by making the entire bundle less useful than a bunch of independent services, each competing to be the best at that one specific thing.
12Hard disagree. There is a huge difference between the convenience of having a camera on you at all times and giving control of all of your services to a single provider or company that then locks you in.
It's not like the different apps make my phone take up more space in my pocket.
10As far as I know, "a program should do one thing and do it well" is unique to the Unix philosophy. In mechanical engineering we have no comparable philosophy for components with weight; twice the moving parts cost twice as much.
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It's very, very convenient. If it didn't cost more, it would've been great. When I say cost I mean cost in multiple different aspects. From financial, through privacy, environmental, freedom, among others.
3Like others said, convenience. And sometimes that makes sense. But consumers should think critically and research before buying/participating in an all in one type product or ecosystem.
A personal example for me is my network setup. My modem, router, hub, and wifi AP are all separate devices. I switched to that kind of setup when Comcast started started making consumer routers public wifi hotspots by default. Yes, you can turn it off but it shouldn't even exist in the first place. My setup is more difficult to manage, and has more points of failure but it also limits the level of fuckery any given vendor can do to MY network.
Edit: s/internet/network. And spelling.
2Sounds exactly like when cameras started being added on phones. There was a lot of people complaining as well.
I guess half of it is not having the foresight to see it’s potential.
1
Never use an app for what should be a web site.
29Except Lemmy. Then it's OK to use an app.
18I don’t know if OP had this in mind. But a website and webapp are different. The whole UX ruleset we follow for both are different from the ground up (websites have big buttons, webapps have compact buttons)
If it should’ve been a website, there’s no need for a webapp or native app.
If it should’ve been a webapp, a native app makes sense too
4nope. PS, kbin.social
and web apps are contained in the browser sandbox.3
There are almost no websites now, all are JavaScript apps build on top of assumption that everyone is using same 3-4 browsers.
3"Javascript is a fundamental part of HTML5"
2
We’ve always had super apps that can run a number of 3rd party plugins, they’re called operating systems. /s
25Come to think of it, the Apple Ecosystem and Google Ecosystem are somewhat established super apps. But probably the major difference is that they have to play well with their competitors to an extent. iMessage within itself has a third party app ecosystem.
10
Emacs does it all and is actually pretty nice though.
24Emacs is more like a runtime for many smaller programs doing all these things, with common way for them to talk to each other. It's closer to Java than to Facebook.
14The good old Unix philosophy.
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Can I read Lemmy in Emacs?
5Oh you certainly can, does that mean you should?
4Looks like it: https://codeberg.org/martianh/lem.el I haven't tried it though.
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You trying to start a war, or what?
4
There's a good but at times strange podcast about a super app that takes over society. It's sort of like histories told from the far future about our near future. Most of the tales are told in first person so it takes a some listening to get a sense of the timeline of the world.
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