No, I’m describing user experience here. Apps with APIs don’t solve this problem unless there’s a UI on top of these APIs that makes the experience seamless to the users.
Yes, and then somebody has to build an app that uses these APIs to provide a unified UI to the user. That is precisely the missing piece. Hope that clears things up for you man.
Android provides an API to present your app in the system and launcher, and UI toolkits to present a consistent UI and UX. Apple does too, more forcefully. A “super app” is just inserting another layer.
Oh linked it a little while back, she does a great job explaining UX in general I find. And it’s always interesting how the social and material conditions drive these things. For example, this video on how web design in India tends to be very spartan is interesting too. She explains how a lot of the population doesn’t have fast mobile phones, and so sites have to be snappy on older hardware which means have much leaner and more functional designs.
Great, but that has nothing to do with software architecture. Rolling everything into one app instead of using the OS platform is not good software architecture.
It has everything to do with software architecture. You’re not seeing the bigger picture here. The architecture is that you have a common UI layer with apps acting as services that plug into it. This doesn’t have to be done via an app like WeChat, it could be provided as part of the OS itself. The advantage is that you can mix and match functionality from different apps trivially to create custom UX workflows, and this approach facilitates things like automation where you can make scripts to chain apps together the same way you can do with shell commands.
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.
Yes, it is a platform that provides a common set of APIs that allow different apps to be unified within a single UI. This has nothing to do with closed layers, it’s not different from the APIs app devs have to use on Android or iOS.
Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, et al provide you APIs for interacting with the operating system, for instance if I want to send a request over the network, I tell the operating system to send this request through the network card.
But they do not dictate what I draw for my app on the screen, how I send messages between apps, or really anything at the application later. The OS APIs are there as an interface between the hardware and the application layer and that’s it.
Like I said, iOS tries to dips it’s finger far into the application layer and make itself a platform to have more control, not let apps compete with Apple’s apps, and so that they can charge you at every application interaction.
It is a story as old as tech. We build a wonderful open internet based on open standards, so social media companies come in and built a closed network on top of that so that they can control everything. Operating systems have historically been designed by big nerds as relatively open platforms, so what happens? Apple comes along and tries to turn iOS into a closed platform and everyone else comes along and tries to build a closed OS platform (a ‘super app’), on top of the existing open platforms.
Super apps and their design is 100% about enriching the controlling company and nothing else.
And I’m explaining to you that having a unified interface is a benefit from user perspective because now each app is basically a service behind a single consistent UI layer. Perhaps thinking of how a browser works might help you understand this. It’s pretty clear you’re just doing demagogy here instead of actually trying to understand the tradeoffs.
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.
No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’ve explained myself very clearly, but it’s clear that you don’t intend to engage with what I’m actually saying.
No, I’m describing user experience here. Apps with APIs don’t solve this problem unless there’s a UI on top of these APIs that makes the experience seamless to the users.
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.
Yes, and then somebody has to build an app that uses these APIs to provide a unified UI to the user. That is precisely the missing piece. Hope that clears things up for you man.
I think that’s called an operating system
This functionality certainly can be provided by an operating system, but that’s not how it works on Android or iOS currently.
Android provides an API to present your app in the system and launcher, and UI toolkits to present a consistent UI and UX. Apple does too, more forcefully. A “super app” is just inserting another layer.
This video explains the actual tangible differences in US from user perspective https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSMFnJnY7EA
Neat video, you should make that a post to !technology@lemmy.ml if you haven’t already.
Oh linked it a little while back, she does a great job explaining UX in general I find. And it’s always interesting how the social and material conditions drive these things. For example, this video on how web design in India tends to be very spartan is interesting too. She explains how a lot of the population doesn’t have fast mobile phones, and so sites have to be snappy on older hardware which means have much leaner and more functional designs.
Great, but that has nothing to do with software architecture. Rolling everything into one app instead of using the OS platform is not good software architecture.
It has everything to do with software architecture. You’re not seeing the bigger picture here. The architecture is that you have a common UI layer with apps acting as services that plug into it. This doesn’t have to be done via an app like WeChat, it could be provided as part of the OS itself. The advantage is that you can mix and match functionality from different apps trivially to create custom UX workflows, and this approach facilitates things like automation where you can make scripts to chain apps together the same way you can do with shell commands.
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.
Yes, it is a platform that provides a common set of APIs that allow different apps to be unified within a single UI. This has nothing to do with closed layers, it’s not different from the APIs app devs have to use on Android or iOS.
Yes it absolutely is different.
Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, et al provide you APIs for interacting with the operating system, for instance if I want to send a request over the network, I tell the operating system to send this request through the network card.
But they do not dictate what I draw for my app on the screen, how I send messages between apps, or really anything at the application later. The OS APIs are there as an interface between the hardware and the application layer and that’s it.
Like I said, iOS tries to dips it’s finger far into the application layer and make itself a platform to have more control, not let apps compete with Apple’s apps, and so that they can charge you at every application interaction.
It is a story as old as tech. We build a wonderful open internet based on open standards, so social media companies come in and built a closed network on top of that so that they can control everything. Operating systems have historically been designed by big nerds as relatively open platforms, so what happens? Apple comes along and tries to turn iOS into a closed platform and everyone else comes along and tries to build a closed OS platform (a ‘super app’), on top of the existing open platforms.
Super apps and their design is 100% about enriching the controlling company and nothing else.
And I’m explaining to you that having a unified interface is a benefit from user perspective because now each app is basically a service behind a single consistent UI layer. Perhaps thinking of how a browser works might help you understand this. It’s pretty clear you’re just doing demagogy here instead of actually trying to understand the tradeoffs.
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.
No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’ve explained myself very clearly, but it’s clear that you don’t intend to engage with what I’m actually saying.