We-chat = Bad
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Wow, a “one app for everything” model, how horribly inconvenient and obnoxious!
I would much rather download multiple apps on my phone, each from a tech company that has a monopoly on their pertinent share of the market. Although this may be inconvenient to some who have a disdain for American freedom and enterprise, I will not be shaken by CCP propaganda or anything that might shake the country I hold dear!!! #RESIST #HARRIS2028
Not sure what’s the point here, do you prefer to have one private company providing you everything over multiple companies?
The name “super app” alone terrifies me. I’m explicitly avoiding apps from private companies that are not privacy friendly, so I really don’t get why I would like something like wechat.
libs were trying to tell me exactly this completely unironically here https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6805581
I really wish I could find the video for it, but:
Bill Hicks on the theft of his material by Denis Leary: "I have a scoop for you. I stole his act…I camouflaged it with punchlines. And to really throw people off, I did it before he did.”
there’s 18 super apps… we should conglomerate them all into one app and sweep the market.
there’s 19 super apps…
In a socialist society perhaps this would be less of a concern, but my main gripe with this type of approach is the centralization of data and the havoc it would wreak on digital privacy. As it stands, I can compartmentalize what companies have access to this information or that information, and have exceptions in my security modeling for specific services. If one company has a data breach, that’s more tolerable because they have the minimal amount of data necessary on me and I gave them a unique email and password. If all my apps were combined, then I’m at the mercy of one company to maintain my security, and if there’s a leak then everything is compromised. Additionally, I pick and choose who I trust and what data is exposed to which parties under the individual app per service model. With a super app, if they are spying on metadata or god forbid not using encryption and just reading my messages etc, then they have all of it and I have no protection
I don’t think the idea has to be implemented in this way though. The key difference in my mind is that instead of having each app be its own isolated thing, you treat them more as services with APIs. One way this can be handled at the UI toolkit in the OS that could generate a something like a JSON API for each app based on the UI to query the app. This way apps could be trivially composed into custom UIs and workflows, or even scripted. This would follow the whole Unix philosophy where you have a bunch of utils that can be piped together to produce whatever functionality you need.
