This article is such neoliberal rubbish though. It's blaming regulation for a lack of super-apps, when the real problem is that individualised competition and profits are prioritised over cooperation and users.

Open protocols for apps to talk to each other are all but dead, fediverse and email being the exceptions.

Which is not to say China's model is great, it's just one that prioritises centralised organisation over distributed cooperation.

You're literally just describing apps that have open APIs and can integrate with each other.

That used to be the norm here too. The problem is entirely one of capitalism encouraging anti-competitive walled gardens.

Designing an app a certain way is not technology in any kind of protectable IP way and is NOT what people are talking about when they talk about China stealing tech.

No one cares that China released an app that looks like Facebook, Facebook regularly apes the design of all its rivals.

What people care about China stealing is stuff like a company's internal research documents describing how to engineer high strength low, weight steel that took a team of PhD researchers in multiple high tech labs ten years and millions of dollars to research and develop. That is the kind of IP and technology that China steals that people care about, not a software UX that an intern can whip up in a week.

Yeah man, that's called an application.

MSN Messenger had an application, ICQ had an application, both had APIs though, so you then had third party apps that integrated and unified them.

The "struggle" is because Apple and Google refuse to do so as they built the platform to give themselves priority.

One can trivially do so on a Linux phone, e.g. PinePhone with PostMarketOS.

Source: I did it. Plenty of others do through the usual ways, e.g. pipe in the console but also with things like sxmo.org/docs/user/sxmo.7.html…

Sxmo: Simple X mobile

A minimalist linux smartphone environment that is truly yours to control! Sxmo, or Simple X Mobile, is a collection of simple and suckless X programs and scripts used together to create a fully functional mobile UI adhering to the Unix philosophy for…

^{Sxmo: Simple X mobile}

You misunderstand. If you make a "Super App", you ARE making an operating system. Yes most OS's have UX problems that prevent this level of integration, but the critical difference is that you're giving complete control to a single entity.

The client-server pattern perpetuates power imbalances, and "Super apps" make that problem much much worse.

Yeah, and that's not the model of a super app. A super app provides APIs that it forces it's sub apps to use, as opposed to building an app that unifies a given app's published APIs.

It's literally just a "platform" under a different name, meaning that it's a tech company trying to build a closed layer that they control that everything is forced through so that they can eventuallg put up a tollbooth and commit highway robbery.

It's what Apple tried to turn iOS into before the EU slapped the fuck out of them.

I can literally go on the calendar, add a location which will interface with the maps app, which can give me reviews, menus, directions, etc. Add people from my contacts, who use any type of email and cal they like (not limited to WhatsApp users) and have an email sent off with an ICS file to add to their calendar of choice. Provide a drive attachment in the same calendar invite if there was something to discuss with this meetup...

Feeding all my info to a Chinese app isn't going to somehow improve that. My larger interest is in breaking up the aggregation of data by a single entity.

No need to use strong language, I understand what you're trying to say.

As a UX dev of over 10 years, UX is important but secondary to safeguards against being toyed with by power-tripping tech bros. That's why I use fedi, that's why I build with ipfs instead of http.

There's nothing I need so bad that I would give up my digital freedoms.

I'm not even talking about UI frameworks anymore, but the UX and client-server or distributed models that you'd build with them.

You can't build a super-app without also creating a massive power imbalance.

So you're saying that we already have super apps, they're called the internet, and that the entire concept of an OS level super app is unnecessary and a clear attempt at a company to exert control and extract more money from consumers?

Like I said, we already have that unified interface, it's called an OS and a web browser. A super app is just a closed off version of that.

Again, you're defending close platforms run by giant corporations to extra money from you.

Elon isn't interested in super apps because he cares about the common person, he cares about them because he can build a platform to extract your money with.

Windows 8 made a legitimate effort to provide unified OS-level APIs that apps could hook into and deeply integrate with. The "People Hub" was easily the best example of this, plus Charms, Settings integration, etc.

Everyone hated it because they didn't understand it.

I am engaging with what you're saying, and I'm explaining why what you're saying is wrong.

I'm literally a professional software developer who writes applications. I know the difference between a traditional set of OS apis like you see with Linux, the platformized nonsense iOS apis, the concept of applications using other applications to create a new unified experience using their own published APIs, and apps that publish APIs to try and be platforms.

I have literally used and build software under all of those models and have very clearly engaged with this conversation, so maybe you should be doing some self reflection instead.

Building walled gardens apps where you control everything is easier than building a walled garden OS where you control everything.

One is an App and the other is an OS, but both can be turned into a "walled garden trap" for consumers.

"But they did it" isn't an excuse to do it more. We have enough of this going around already with Apple and X and WeChat, governments and tech bros trying to maintain control over the masses. Nah.

I've explained repeatedly why you

a) don't need a super app to do that, you can build applications with interfaces that unify other applications in whatever way you want, as long as those applications have published APIs, and

b) why we already have unified UI platforms (operating systems & web browsers)

All you have done is blindly defend super apps, while ignoring the point that they are fundamentally closed platforms designed to extract money from consumers.

They literally JUST banned and unbanned Tiktok at the whim of an annoying orange, and Twitter as we knew it is dead because of a rich billionaire.

You're glossing over real problems in the name of good ux.

And I've explained to you repeatedly that nobody cares about what you personally want. What's being discussed is what's a better UX, which is obviously having a single unified UI backed by APIs. I've also explained to you deficiencies in the current UI platforms, but you evidently are unable to grasp these problems.

All you have done is blindly defend super apps, while ignoring the point that they are fundamentally closed platforms designed to extract money from consumers.

Nope, but keep repeating that since you don't actually have a sound argument to make.

Everything, this entire thread and several others that people have started with you.

It's worth saying twice:

The client-server pattern perpetuates power imbalances, and "Super apps" make that problem much much worse.

And I've explained to you repeatedly that nobody cares about what you personally want. What's being discussed is what's a better UX, which is obviously having a single unified UI backed by APIs. I've also explained to you deficiencies in the current UI platforms, but you evidently are unable to grasp these problems.

Bruh, you've explained jack shit beyond saying 'but it's obviously nicer when apps integrate with each other', and you haven't once approached explaining why a super app is the architecture necessary to achieve that when we used to have it all the time before walled gardens.

The client-server pattern perpetuates power imbalances, and “Super apps” make that problem much much worse.

It's just something you keep repeating, but that's just not true. Coupling the UI with the business logic of the application is a fundamentally wrong approach. It makes it effectively impossible to compose apps the way you can compose command line utils with piping. Apps should be designed as client/server by default, and then you could always leverage the service API for the app any way you want, slap a custom UI, use it in automation scripts, etc. It’s just way more flexible that way.

Nobody in their right mind couples UI to business logic, we have MVVM for that and it enables some very impressive integration and UI switching in apps.

However, thinking at the application level is ignoring everything I just said about the ways that apps communicate.

LMFAO, such engagement, such explanation.

You're really living up to the .ml domain.

MVVM stands for Model-View-ViewModel, and is a pattern commonly used in dotnet and winui apps for decoupling backend business logic from frontend UI.

For example, this: youtu.be/Nb6fEeYfDAU

I feel like I'm the one being trolled here.

What on earth do you mean by "no app provides APIs to access the business logic layer outside the UI?" These apps are using APIs to begin with, the app doesn't NEED to provide them. The devs provides them to the app, the other way around.

I understand how MVC works perfectly fine. This is not what the discussion is about. What you're being told is that apps you'll find in the wild typically DO NOT provide APIs that can be leveraged in the way I described. You completely ignored that.

Show me what Android or iOS apps can be used at API level to create a custom UI on top of them using a third party app.

1. This isn't MVC
2. I directly addressed that-- APIs exist independent of any one app.
3. This question about using an App as an API doesn't make sense. Apps use APIs, they do not provide them.

Also--- nobody is telling me. I've been doing this for over a decade.

You're describing a Platform, but we have an actual oligarchy of tech platforms now. When they get too big, they just become power grabs, hence why Mastodon and Lemmy and fedi in general started picking up recently.

It's not worth even a scrap of good UX if these platforms can take away our voices on a whim. Fedi is on the right track.

@yogthos

Huh?

"Demagogy is the action or fact of winning support by exciting the emotions of ordinary people rather than by having good or morally right ideas."

Are you saying that fedi isn't a morally good idea?

I agree that morals should fuel our discussion and not emotion, but I'm sensing strong emotions from you.

Regardless, I see what you're saying because I've built things like this. I specialize in abstractions in my work-- Strix Music is a prime example of that.