this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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I dont think an "everything app" will ever work.
You can make one thing that does one thing very well and better than the competition, and you will get users. Or you can do one thing that will try to do 10 things half assed, and it will fail to impress users. This happens because you have to divert your resources (time, money, people) for development, maintenance, new ideas, design etc. across all your "everythings". The more everythings you have, the less resources each one gets, however the costs for maintenance, bugfixes, updates etc. stay the same.
This happened to Yahoo in the early 2000s, where it tried to be Search, News portal, Email, Web directory, Weather, games and whathaveyou, however it failed because none of it's parts was better than the competition.
The better approach for an app would be to do it's own thing it is supposed to do, but support other apps that can enhance your product by allowing it to interact with outside data, and also give his data back out to other apps: use mailto:links/email instead of inventing your own messaging protocoll, support exporting to standard calendar files instead of implementing your own calendar that is oblivious to the schedule on the users phone. Support exporting datasets into common formats the user knows from his everyday tasks (excel, csv) so he can run his own data analysis on it, instead of baking some half-assed "analytics" module that only has 10% of the features the user needs.
Of course it works. See WeChat in China.
But I doubt it’ll be X that will make it work in the rest of the world.
That is a good example, but as the other commenter pointed out I dont think you can compare weChat with Twitter. Twitter is a startup trying to make money from it's service. WeChat is a tool for the chinese goverment to track each persons chats, money transactions and purchases, and as such will pretty much receive all the funding it needs. Being profitable is not the main objective of WeChat.
The Chinese government can track any app in their country. Their laws just give them acces to the data if they want it (the same as the usa basically). They don't give a shit about WeChat.
Sure, but withg wechat you can link each user to the real person, bank account, phone number and find his friend circle on we chat. This might not work so well on other apps where any user can sign up via vpn and a random email address...