It makes sense that it would come from a more authoritarian country first. But Whatsapp, say, could add payments and similar features if they were valuable to users.
This is all commentary on something Elon Musk probably said in the hope that investors would fling cash at him, of course.
And the benefits of centralization are immediate and obvious; the downsides are hidden, localized, and not clear.
Similar things that were baked into the internet continue to provide dividends today, but it has to be intentional, and as more and more of the modern internet is designed by groups of companies rather than groups of academics it can shift.
- McLuhan
Stuff that changes that nature of the internet presents the danger to liberal democracy.
Anti-trust regulation is supposed to solve this, but in the US at least it seems we've settled on a status quo where we pretend having two giant players in a market rather than one is enough to protect the interests of consumers, despite many many examples where that has proven not to be the case.
Only if it's provably harmful. And only if you hire people into the anti-trust regulation role who are perfect uncorruptable beings that can see the future consumer implications of each business decision.
Given the regulators we've hired so far are neither, we shouldn't be assuming regulations can solve this.
In reality, regulations give a big first mover advantage. It's much easier to incorporate regulations when you're up and running than come in as a new competitor and slam into a wall of red tape, which due to years of relationship built up is much more porous for the incumbants.
The logic behind the emergence of these apps is pretty simple. An app store is a walled garden everyone is forced to use. An app's popularity on the store is self-reinforcing, it tends to snowball. If you get a really big app going with a lot of installs, why not add more services to make more money from those installs? Then maybe all those services have some kind of referral incentive and you snowball even more...
There are different hurdles in different markets but I see absolutely no reason this concept couldn't take off in the West. (Bloat and bad UX would prevent it? That's a joke right?)
It could, but it would require the government to require use of the everything app in some way. In the west, there are so many choices for payments and messaging. Yes the snowballing you describe exists, but requires an immense amount of gravity - that at this point only Apple and Google really have.
Let's be blunt: the elevator pitch for the 'everything app' as «a smartphone application that will deliver everything to everyone on the planet» has already been solved. The pitch that Elon Musk and other tech oligarchs want to solve has an addendum, which the WebBrowser+ ecosystem does not yet[0] satisfy: «a smartphone application that will deliver everything to everyone on the planet [and is under the control of a single entity for its own benefit]»
[0] I say "not yet" because developing a new app from scratch is not the only strategy—see Google trying its best to make Chrome and derivatives the only useful 'everything apps'
The issue as described in this article is the control of the single channel by one entity. The browser is an "everything app" in the same sense a television is an "everything communication appliance," but the signal you can put on it is sourced from thousands of different, independent operators (assuming, for TV, you have plugged in more than just a cable line).
In general, when companies that create browsers have attempted to reduce the browser to a single-channel tool (by, for instance, constraining the sites it will access), the browser has fallen in general-use popularity.
Similar to how you need programs for the OS platform to be useful.
Things you deploy to are platforms (web, windows, macos, etc.), the things being deployed onto platforms are apps.
But a browser was first (and still is) a document reader, so it's also a limited app in that sense.