Asian and African super apps are following the playbook WeChat originated
afridigest.substack.com
afridigest.substack.com
- There is no single Play Store equivalent, so the barrier to make people install a relatively unknown app is higher.
- Phones do not come with Google Services Framework, so the barrier to develop a networked app is higher.
- Just like everywhere else, people will use whatever is available because a suboptimal solution is still better than opting out completely from the benefits these solutions bring.
I don't think in China specifically it's about low-end devices or data cost at all. South East Asia - perhaps, but all in all the situation reflects the structure of the economies (the prevalence of monopolistic conglomerates with a finger in every pie).
Most of the time the most widespread solution is far from excellent because it only has to be better than the competition. Even more so when competition is limited by entry barriers to the point it hardly exists. So while the article is a good summary of the situation, it ends up being a bit like wondering why people use Windows.
Android is already one abstraction layer on top of another, there is no intrinsic technological benefit of adding yet another one OS-like super app on top of it, or at the very least any such benefits remain to be demonstrated.
Looking at f-droid: hobbyists seem to do just fine without google play services. I feel like this gives you a business advantage rather than a technical one.
I go searching and I can't figure out what some of the apps even "DO", others are "Here is this app, you need to install these other things too to make it work, also it only works with X, so maybe it will work for you I duno....".
Now I get why it is the way it is, I don't expect much more from folks putting out software for me like that, but it's a terrible user experience.
This has very little to do with what I said (arguing some library doesn’t make things easier) but ok.
>I go searching and I can't figure out what some of the apps even "DO",
It’s been a couple years but I don’t remember the play store being different.
>Here is this app, you need to install these other things too to make it work
Like the Termux API app needing termux? That’s the only one I remember being like that. Most of the apps I used were self contained. Do you have an example?
From memory F-droid was much better than google play except for the lower selection but it has been a while.
It's not good for app discovery. You already need to know what you are looking for. Other than that, most of the time it works fine.
In other words, it's a bit like Amazon.
What are you installing to make it a bad user experience?
I don't have google services (no google account) at all, only use F-Droid and Aurora store and haven't any problems. Even convinced a friend to go the same route with minimal handholding and they aren't technically inclined - no problems.
F-Droid is doing fine but mostly with a certain kind of apps that either run entirely on the device, or connect to third-party networks via more or less established protocols like IMAP, XMPP, OpenDAV, etc.
Google provides Cloud Messaging, Firebase, etc. free of charge. Everything can be worked around with enough money thrown at it of course but choices like this tip the scale in favor of going for a mini-app instead of a standalone one.
I have set up Android phones with Lineage for several relatives, and if the user is comfortable doing online banking through the browser instead of a bank-provided app, then there is really no need for Google Play services or the MicroG substitute. Whatsapp runs fine without Play services, and in my region OSM-based maps are a viable competitor to Google Maps.
Google themselves has struggled in this market: see the Nexus line.
This has to be prove by market. If the OS-ish super apps are winning, means the customers are approving it.
If people are not eating meat in North Korea, it doesn't necessarily mean they're supporting vegetarianism.
It is funny, that GMS itself is yet another layer built upon Android.
How is it different that Tencent distributing this layer via WeChat, other than Google bundles this layer through GMS?
Tencent does have its counterpart of GMS, like piece by piece, but that approach isn't winning against WeChat either.
The main benefit of super apps, and why it is so popular in those countries, is that it doesn't require users to download anything to use new feature. In some use cases I also found that so convenient.
Just as an example, WeChat has an ecosystem of mini-apps. When you go to a restaurant in China, you can often find QR code on each table. If you can that QR code, it would open a mini-apps that lets you place orders and make payments, without waiting for the waiter to serve you. A mini app is like a website that doesn't require download and storage on the phone, but the user experience feels more native and is tightly integrated with features available in WeChat. It would be much harder to get users if the same thing requires you download an app.
A nice, smooth, mobile-optimized website, I mean.
I can now go to a vendor's website (say jrwatkins.com, etc.) on my phone, checkout, do a fingerprint/face scan on Apple Pay and the transaction is done in under 5 seconds.
I assume the experience with Google Pay is similar.
There's no longer a need to create an account on the website. The delivery address defaults to the one on Apple Pay (and can be modified at time of payment). Delivery method can also be selected on the Apple Pay screen. My credit card number is never transmitted. This type of frictionless checkout that was once the domain of companies like Hoteltonight is now becoming more common on ecommerce sites.
We've never been big on mobile payments in the U.S. (because credit cards), but I'm finding myself using Apple Pay more and more. I read somewhere than ~50% of payments in the U.S. are now contactless.
I'm kind of thinking of markets outside China though.
I don't know what payment methods these services require now, but in the beginning at least, they both supports just credit cards, which is basically suicidal. Most users won't be able to use it at all.
From merchants' perspective, they don't need to pay for transactions on WeChat Pay or AliPay, whereas both Apple Pay and credit card companies would charge them for usage. For this reason most small business wouldn't even think of using them.
It supports Apple Cash, which in turn can funded via a bank debit card. (kind of like Venmo). There's no transaction fee with Apple Cash.
I believe there are currently no additional fees on the merchant side to accept Apple Pay [1], unless the customer uses a credit card via Apple Pay in which case the standard credit card fees apply.
According to the Apple developer docs[1], websites don't have to integrate with Apple Pay specifically; Safari also supports the (fairly new) platform-neutral Payment Request API[2]. Google's docs[3] suggest that something similar is available for Chrome on Android.
1. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w...
I don't know about iOS but the two copy features from each other all the time so Apple probably has it too (if they weren't the first to launch them).
Honestly, if you're working from a QR code you might as well just serve a mobile web app. If you add PWA support your customers might even install it if they come around often.
As someone who's never been to China and has never used a super-app: just curious, what are some of the obstacles faced installing a mobile app? Is it that most people don't trust un-curated apps?
A super app that brings existing user bases solves both the deployment and discoverability problems.
Actually learning every new app is an obstacle, but they managed to learn to a few apps like WeChat because it's super useful. They won't spend time to learn about something that won't bring immediate reward. Once they have a few apps installed on their phone, they'd feel that's enough.
- there are multiple play store equivalent, i.e. Mi Store, Baidu store, and several others.
There is actually more competition at app store level in China, as opposed to Google's monopoly on that front, which might be the reason why user behaviors are different.
- not sure how you define OS-like abstraction layer, but Chrome is also basically a super app. In fact, developing for Wechat is more similar to developing website than native app.
What do developers do for push messaging? In older versions of Android, you could maintain a connection to your server in the background, but recent versions make it really hard to stay active, even if you're big enough to get whitelisted by phone OEMs --- if you're small, is it even possible?
This is the history of software, and other businesses as well.
From Jim Barksdale:
“Gentlemen, there’s only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling.” And said, “We’ve got an airplane to catch.” And we left, and Peter Currie, walking out the door, said, “Those people are looking at you, Barksdale, like you’re crazy. What did you just say?” And I said, “Well, best I can tell, most people spend half their time adding and other people spend half their time subtracting, so that’s what works out.”
https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...
Here is another presentation on "super apps" by Connie Chan of A16Z:
https://a16z.com/2020/01/23/four-trends-in-consumer-tech/
Of course the largest "super app" is the operating system as it constantly offers new APIs etc.. and devours more features by point solutions leading to terms like being Sherlocked:
Like the idea that fish don't see water. On one side we have WeChat, but on the other side we have IOS, Android, and the browser.
And we're free... to install approved apps from approved sources. Free... to view stuff inside a browser window that works the way the platform owners want it to.
What if we could unbundle the operating system? I wonder what innovations we're missing out on?
For example, true peer to peer networking would be nice. I don't think we'll ever see it from Apple or Google. It's a hard problem sure, but it's also not in anyone's interest to allow people to communicate directly without platforms intermediating.
Companies like to bundle products because they know that when they do that they can sell more mediocrity at a higher price.
Remind me how that turned out for them.
They _thought_ they didn't have to. Bundling is a powerful strategy, but it isn't a magic wand that dispels competition. You still need to offer a compelling product.
Apple learned that a monopoly is only illegal when it stifles competition, but if no competition is ever allowed then regulatory bodies completely overlook it.
Google learned that you don't have to stifle the competition, instead you overwhelm them with openness. You make everything you do an open or standardized and keep dumping it over the fence.
Regulators look at the market. When they looked at desktops in 2001 they saw Microsoft with 90%+ domination and were concerned that consumer choice might be compromised and was being abused. For mobile they don't look at the 'iOS market', they look at the smartphone market and see Apple with less that 50% of it in the US.
So if you're concerned about Apple's potential abuse of it's power over it's users, which is entirely fair, anti-trust simply isn't the way to look at it. You'd need to go to regular consumer protection legislation.
Google stifles competition by using their incredible ad revenue engine to fund products like Android and then giving them away for what amounts to "future consideration", effectively destroying the non-apple OS market as well as other markets.
Microsoft is definitely paying for their hubris now... Or at least, they were. It seems that they've managed to offset that enough that people respect them again.
To me, they will always be that company that decided to just bulldoze everyone else and force their way on everyone. That doesn't mean I don't use their products. But it does mean I always look for alternatives.
Having said that, there are precious few companies out there that I don't feel that way about now. I'm struggling to come up with any that aren't game developers at the moment.
MS doesn't care about the browser; they care about the friction that sells Windows on PCs and USLs for Office 365/etc. Otherwise, they would have stamped out Chrome years ago. They care now because newer web frameworks have proliferated, and Microsoft has the means to shift customers from IE11 ActiveX apps or whatever to Azure-hosted services like PowerApps.
It's one of the shitty things about this era... nobody is motivated to care much about the computers that we all rely on to work. Windows 10 lacks a unifying vision, MacOS is sort of a hobby project in the company, and Linux desktop is a dumpster fire.
Generally the IT department apps target IE as they are Windows shops, while all the line of business apps developed internally by the business technology teams (Trading, Risk, development tooling) primarily target Chrome and those teams prefer Linux as their back-end platform of choice.
MS have been trying really hard to compete with Chrome. Edge was a genuine, all-in effort to win back the desktop browser space on Windows. A primary reason it failed was precisely because so many enterprises had already had to put Chrome everywhere and developed scads of enterprise web apps that relied on Chrome and FF. It was too late. Our IT department tried really hard to push Edge when it came out, but everyone in the business technology teams just went "Meh, Sucks" and carried on using Chrome and Firefox as much as possible.
I'm guessing it would mean being able to install alternative browsers. Which is possible on most OS's, but not iOS.
I think the only one benefitting from that would be the middleman to test the various os:s against the zillion or so hardware platforms and combinations out there to provide at least some selection of OS that might or might not work on your device (instead of just bricking it right away).
A mobile device is not some standard hardware supporting a standard OS. A mobile device is an agglomeration standard or non-standard hardware components, and their hardware drivers, bundled with an OS that probably has been customized some way to facilitate the underlying platform.
You can't abstract the world away. OS is the level where the dirty nitty gritty details of running a hardware system are hidden away from the user.
You still need to have a platform where to install and run all the device drivers and so on..
So what happens then is people come up with bundled solutions called Distros, but there are dozens of them.
On mobile the nearest equivalent are all the small time AOSP based OEMs, but even then end users are manipulated in certain ways by the default apps and app store that comes with the phone.
Some other examples in the consumer space would be React Native, Flutter, Electron, etc.
Right now everything is its own product with all the overhead that it brings with it.
Eventually, as more and more “AI” things (abstract on purpose) will be integrated on the OS level, we will have a more streamlined process for development of “smart” software products on such a OS.
I put AI and smart in quotes because with our current understanding it means ML/DL which means things like voice and pattern recognition, text summarization, perfect OCR, text/content generation, visual indexing etc.
We do know from experience that the way we interact with a typical OS, whether mobile or laptop/desktop, does not change very often. iOS was ground breaking because it put the context first. A decision that is still causing problems for power users as seen with the difficulties in becoming productive with iPads. Example:
previously: PDF Reader program to show a pdf. Can be saved to disk and sent as file via mail
now: pdf file as context passed between apps through share dialog for reading followed by mailing
What interests me quite a lot is how we might interact with an OS that will become such a ‘smart OS-like super app’ by bundling the features mentioned above.
Will they only exist as APIs for software developers to use on these systems, for ease of development?
Or will they be somehow integrated into the common end users usage of and interaction with that system?
I bet there is a lot of value in solving the latter
They started acquiring software in the 1980's. Software that would be reasonably good would go to CA to die an awful and slow death.
They're still around. They don't own a single piece of groundbreaking software, but they still make money.
Almost all big tech companies have huge graveyards of acquired software companies, some for the products, some for tech, some for people.
The targets are acquired, in-digested and slowly die. What is left is a lot of millionaires / billionaires who move on to other big things, a lot of half-baked tech / feature stuff, a lot of wasted potential.
On the contrary, it seems that WeChat has been wildly successful in China.
They are hot-spots of monopolies, censorship and are front-line enemies for democracies. Especially if they include social / news / events / groups stuff.
I wish, there are more apps, bound together with integration mechanisms (loosely coupled, high cohesion) rather than one super app.
Unfortunately, the whole world is moving towards super apps. Google / Amazon / FB / Apple are all doing Commerce / Banking / Products / Entertainment / Internet Services / Cloud Computing / News & Information / Social at the same time. (There may be some exceptions, like Apple not doing commerce like Amazon)
I guess business moves in circles. There was consolidation in times of Standard Oil (or steel, I don't recall), where controlling everything in every vertical is the game, then business moved towards a more distributed services type structures, then we are witnessing another round of consolidation.
Across all sectors, this is more pronounced in US, a handful of companies directly / indirectly control huge aspects of an individuals life.
Unfortunate.
Google Pay has opened its platform to select companies to offer their services: food ordering, investment products etc
Facebook invested in India's largest telecom network Jio (owned by Reliance which is India's largest listed company) and there are indications that they are building a super app with OTT, e-commerce, grocery etc as offerings.
As I understand it, nowadays OS shells do provide something like that, by having a smart indexing and search tool available. A "super app" seems to be another way to provide that consolidation, but is there more to it than indexing?
A user is basically having a chat with their device. The UI is the language available for the user to form queries. The more flexible the language, the more the user may express complex queries. But users don't really want to learn a complex language, they want something either "intuitive" or matching their interests from the beginning (ie, opening up the search possibilities, or narrowing down to a usable set of targets). Because intuition is only made from analogies of accumulated knowledge, the former can only be constructed by having the app capable of understanding (possibly a subset of) the user language, which leads to Siri and the like. The later by reducing the scope of the super app to a template of interests, which could either fixed (mainstream topics), or determined from a set of existing models by having the user go through a questionnaire at app install to narrow down their interests to a manageable subset.
I think that for now the key factors are:
(1) consolidation of information, because the user doesn't want to jump through each of their accounts or data sources to find what their looking for.
(2) automatic connection of different services (banking, online markets, and perhaps many other use cases); this is only relevant for services which are not equipped with a protocol to deal with a given form of connectivity. Perhaps this is a generalization of (1).
(3) social interaction and controlled sharing of data
(4) security
Ultimately, the UI would have to become some sort of programming language to really be able to fulfill all of the users wishes, but natural languages are a poor fit for this task, and because of this the feature set of these apps will always be limited, unless somehow Siri and al learn to ask the user to be more precise when there are ambiguities (not unlike the dialogue that exists between a programmer and a compiler). Also, speaking to your app is not really a secure way of interacting with it, unless you're alone when doing it, and you never leave your device.
I don't claim to be capable of producing the software that is discussed, I'm merely stating my opinion on the topic. Most likely my view on this is skewed and not deep enough to be qualified as insightful. I feel that the work done on all these applications are already quite a feat, but I also remember seeing hard critics about Siri, Cortana and these solutions when they are quite difficult to get to the level they've reached. Yet, I also think that there is still a long way until they really become good assistants. The other way I discussed - which is these super apps - in my opinion require quite a bit of customizability to get out of the dashboard trench, but since I don't believe to have an accurate view of what they are capable of these days, you probably want to take all of that with a large grain of salt.
I think super apps can be good, useful and fast if made well, but most of the time it's slow, bloat, messy, cluttered, etc. - seriously, no amount of negative adjectives can describe this kind of abomination of app. I feel bad for our users - our exe seems to like it though...I guess they never use it.
So all the usual crap is available, and you can simply use the application part of an app.
luckily apple will also provide app-snippets.. Unfortunately, authentication is still not fixed
If we frame it this way, I think it helps us understand better the pros and cons of each, and importantly that they appeal to different type of folks depending on their use cases.
For e.g., one of the main appeals of Emacs is that it's easier to combine functionalities across mini-tools within Emacs than in Vim. However, it also means that when building one of these mini-tools, you have to have awareness of all other mini-tools in the system, and integrate with them properly, which makes the cost of building much higher vs Vim.
I mean the US government has that as well with Google and FB and co (see Snowden revelations), but apparently not as much as they'd like.
Political enemies will have a rough life there.
China is just more ruthless on the level of the market in that if you win in China, it really is winner take all. There are no controls on the market to stop monopolies forming.
>The NSA was shown to be secretly accessing Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR surveillance program.
From the slides; it appears it works by the agencies (via the FBI DITU) sending the cooperating company a selector (e.g. email address), and then those companies sending back the actual material (e.g. emails);
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...
From transparency reports it is clear that the receiving company can see how many selectors are coming in and how much data is being "exfiltrated" under this scheme (and it is roughly 10,000 targets).
---
The second quote refers to a program of passive surveillance which - while probably the most underhand thing revealed by Snowden - did not rely on any privileged position of the US government, and could have been pulled off by an adversarial nation as well. It didn't rely on the cooperation of those companies, and in fact they were outraged by it and implemented encryption in an attempt to thwart it.
i.e. you can order meals, order taxis, read blogs in WeChat but doesn't prioritize an "Internet Explorer" taxi company above all other results.
Sure the Tencent company invests in a whole bunch of other companies like Comcast owning The Verge etc, but that has nothing to do with super apps.
Take this trend forward, a phone only has one app that a user clicks on to ‘open’ a new and better ‘operating system’ that better suits their needs.
Each of these app-‘OSs’ will be unavailable to other developers, so it becomes an arms race.
The convenient thing for China is that the CCP picks which companies will be winners and will therefore have the capital backing to compete and make the best app-OSs to get a majority of users to buy in to. They can also build in the required back doors to keep their population from getting any funny ideas.
I get that it’s hard to do this while respecting the more privacy-oriented sensibilities “we” have, but surely it’s not impossible. Is there anything I’m missing, like some cool app that teenagers use...? LinkedIn, for example, should absolutely add it.
Did they try a digital business card that went nowhere?
https://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/23/5-mobile-apps-that-co...
To be clear: I don't think this sort of thing alone is enough to bootstrap on its own in a market with established social networks, but I don't understand why such social networks don't offer it as a feature.
Seems a bit odd.
I think this problem is not that big of a problem. After all, worst case, you can just hand out a paper business card.
There's rarely a need to get someone's contact details without even knowing who they are, at least their name, etc. And when we have their name and we can link them to something (a common friend, a company), we can usually find them quite easily. Or am I mistaken? Are there examples where bump/shake would be really that useful?
Awkward to spell and to remember, unless you write it right there and then and get the other to proofread it. You also get a single piece of information, not even a full name.
> QR code
Pretty uncommon where I live (Northern UK), particularly outside geeky circles.
> take a photo of the email address
This is occasionally done but it's annoying (you have to transcribe it later) and again is unlikely to carry any other data like the guy's name.
> Or call the other one to confirm that you've typed the correct number
It takes time out of the conversation to proofread the contact name as you save it, and you're then lacking email - yeah you can get it with a phone call, which is already pretty awkward ("can I call you to send you an email to organise a call"), and again spelling an email over the phone is pretty bad and error-prone.
> worst case, you can just hand out a paper business card.
That's what I do, but apart from the environmental impact, you then have to print and store a bunch of cards and every time you change job it takes weeks (or months) to get new ones (and cringe at their design).
Dunno, maybe I'm more sensitive to this because my name is difficult to spell for English people, but I do wish I could avoid having to drag with me stacks of thick paper.
> Are there examples where bump/shake would be really that useful?
Trade shows, sales events, all the way to going to a bar and it turns out some guy is a decorator you might call on.
Hm, in my experience for sales stuff you need a card. There's no real way around it. And that's only halfway there, the real thing is when you make the other party take a picture of the card, or .. if you ask their email and send them a hello with your signature containing your info. (Yes, it's awkward, seems dumb, but works exactly because the effort the other party put into it. Just taking a card and putting it next to the other taken cards is just a one-way stop-shop to a dead lead - IMHO.)
Decorator guy? Just type it into your phone. Or send yourself an email with call decorator guy, Tim, [number]. or something.
Sure, maybe there will be some amazing system/solution/app that does this. (Technically it's easy. For example you can just fire up a Bluetooth BLE beacon - eg. a Eddystone URL one. You can switch broadcasting on/off with a toggle. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.alea.beaco... And others can scan for them easily.) But it seems to me the biggest hurdle is simply that people don't want that. They want maximal certainty that they get the info from the person they are actually talking to. (NFC could help with that.)
... and let's say a trade show can start with everyone setting up their contact app. And I think some already do this. (Some already hand out name tags after all.)
That's precisely my point. At the moment that interaction is all half-broken and unreliable, it takes time, it's awkward and error-prone (the bar is loud, the sun is shining, whatever). If we could just whip out a phone and do something quick like shaking it at each other, we'd all be better off. I agree that NFC is likely the way forward for this.
And exactly because bars are loud, but garden parties are too sunny that we would need a very generic/adaptive solution. Currently it's simply solved by raw human wetware processing power, ingenuity and foresight (eg. in case of business cards).
Yes, I think NFC is perfect for contacts, but it needs the social dance too. (Exactly because of the edge cases as in how do you easily accept/reject it if you can't see the screen?)
There are lots of examples of "good enough" stuff preventing adoption of newer tech across the world. I see stuff like the weird US checking account clearance system in this bucket - it would be really expensive to replace, so despite there being newer, better systems elsewhere, it's seen as "good enough" - or the relatively slow uptake of electronic payment in Japan even as cash-based vending machines were far more ubiquitous than elsewhere. That's a lot of infrastructure to upgrade, so advantages have to be extreme, not just present.
I think I tried to get Instacart to work before and I don't think they have it here. So when I found out that the app which I already entered my credit card into for ordering take-out has grocery delivery also, I was pretty happy.
But not having to enter my credit card or do a verification again is pretty convenient. And like I said a lot of US apps aren't available here. So I think Rappi is great. When it works.
I mean, just to clarify Rappi runs like a piece of shit on my phone, sometimes completely freezes, sometimes does not deliver important chat messages, does not seem to have tracking for users, has few restaurants compared to Uber Eats, and the grocery inventory seems to be totally out of date.
However, it's the only one I know of for grocery delivery. And I know that Uber Eats is screwing over restaurants so I would love to order through Rappi. If they can make it slightly less shitty then I would be happy to use it more. It's sort of like an Amazon for delivery.
I'm a fan of KakaoTalk and I specifically include them in the visual: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q...
I think you're referring to where I quoted Ben Thompson, but he was speaking in a specific sense: that there it nothing like WeChat in the sense of being an OS for an entire nation (not simply being a super app). More context around the quote is here: https://stratechery.com/2017/apples-china-problem/
The quote is indeed a bit dated though, I'll grant that -- is KakaoTalk that dominant in SK now?
If it's a large number of tasks with low interop needed, I think these will give way to unbundled open web / app marketplace style platforms. If users in these markets have concentrated needs with high degree of interoperability between them, then I think they will persist.
It started of as an app for one use case (events around stocks), but due to customer requests I'm expanding the use cases to many more areas around finance. So I guess in some time it will be a super app for finance.
With each use case I added so far, the conversion rate, in app time and downloads increased.
The key to it all it to keep it simple I guess and help users configure the app so that they only see what they want.
So Tencent (now as big as Facebook market-cap wise) owes a large part of its success to an acquihire? Impressive.
You're much more likely to have some small scrappy startup steal all your users elsewhere.
> They directly keep out foreign competition like Facebook
As opposed to huwaei that's welcomed with open arms in the US? Lots of countries keep out foreign competition to protect their own industries. It's the smart thing to do. We actually pioneered it in the 1800s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...
So you can copy the chinese government. Not only that, the chinese government copied the US, germany, japan, korea, etc. Protectionism is how every major economic power became a major economic power. Airbus wouldn't exist if it weren't for EU copying "the chinese government".
If you actually want to help China's reputation I'd also advise skipping the whataboutism.
I'm clearly saying you are wrong with examples and sources.
> I have to wonder how anyone can say anything positive about China, if even accurate descriptions are "propaganda".
You can say positive and negative things about every country. China isn't an exception regardless of your agenda. It's bizarre that anyone would even write "wonder how anyone can say anything positive about China".
Well how about this? Their economic growth? Their impressive poverty reduction? Their infrastructure build-up?
> If you actually want to help China's reputation I'd also advise skipping the whataboutism.
It's not "whataboutism" to directly refute your claim : "because you can't copy the Chinese government." + "They directly keep out foreign competition like Facebook".
You certainly see the difference between whataboutism and a refutation with examples right?
And I'm not here to help China's reputation because I don't have an agenda like you. I'm here to refute nonsense and bullshit propaganda.
A single super-platform has the benefit of integrating several functions in a nice package. But while accumulating more functionality at some point it becomes too bloated, innovation slows down, it's a big ball of mud able to do everything, but also bad at everything, at which point it is outpaced left and right by small speedboats specialized on single functions, highly innovative, but with less tight coupling between them. This leaves more burden on the user to integrate them, but at some point the qualitative difference between the big ball of mud and the individual tools is so big that users will gladly do this integrative work if they can then enjoy better solutions...until the individually-constructed "big ball of muds" made out of haphazard integrations of many individual solutions become convoluted enough again for someone to "professionally" integrate some of these functions at the current level of quality into a new "super platform", and the cycle starts anew.
Something that increasingly puzzles me are the implications of having links in a chain that either do not care if things work or not or are able to pressure the rest into obedience though lack of skin in the game. They may seem the least significant but have the most leverage.
"Less is more" is just talk of company that want to not grow into monopolies and I support that view. But users do not.
Outside of software each global conglomerate is the exact opposite of "less is more".