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Super Apps Are Terrible for People—and Great for Companies
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Technology
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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.
Sounds 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.
There'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.
Bundling 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:
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.
Hard 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.
As 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.
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.
Like 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.