If anything, the cruft is shrinking since you simply can't fit as much cruft into mobile.
Let me get this straight. - The phone OS has a shell, usually written in native code. - The messenger app runs on top of the shell, usually written on top of some type of VM. - The messenger app contains a web browser that renders other apps, written in js.
I guess I was thinking of cruft differently. All the messaging and bots are reducing UIs back down to CLIs again. Which is pretty much the sparest UI there is. Except perhaps for voice, the other UI gaining traction on mobile. So, yes, the physical size of mobile devices is reducing practically all the cruft.
I like bots and everything but I wonder if chat's popularity stems from there being a human at the other end?
I don't think so. 15 years ago I created a service to let people access data from my company's intranet via AOL Instant Messenger (which everyone was already using for internal chat). It was still a big hit. People loved the convenience of just being able to ping a bot and immediately get back Client X's phone number, instead of having to wade through umpty-ump levels of menus and web pages to get the same info. The…
If they were so popular, why do they still not exist in any meaningful sense to this day?
I was all over IMified & ActiveBuddy when they came out 10-15 years ago but they never really took off at all. My agent basically returned the Google "magic box" which was kinda cool.
You're right about UX being central to the problem, but you're missing a major part of it here. UX is hard . Getting great user experience takes IMHO a lot more pain than getting algorithms and systems to work right (in most cases). UX is about endless revisions, a lot of boring and often ugly code, obsessing about pixels and quirky details of your UI's "story," and other things that are very time consuming, not fun,…
But isn't that exactly where countless free and paid clients/apps of varying quality for the user to choose from would come in handy? Take RSS as an example - the technology as open for everyone, but as a profit-seeking company you can still seduce with high-quality, polished client / feed reader. Of course, that option would be open to any number of freelancers, one-man-operations and other indie developers, not jus…
This is pretty much why the very common failure state of these open technologies is that some company gets very close to perfecting the UX, pulls in a vast majority of the possible users in that space, then slowly abandons the open technology for closed replacements, thus locking in those users that thought they were buying into the open system. (Google Reader, Google Talk, Facebook Messenger, ...)
How is this not different from the strategy MS used to follow either kill opponents or buy them? How did the anti trust dept of US allow whatsapp acquisition since it literally made FB king of everything digital?
Mostly because they still have tons of competitors in the messaging space and they're not leveraging their success in social networking to force success in messaging. I'm personally reachable from 10-15 different forms of messaging (and neither WhatsApp nor FB messenger), and most people probably have at least 4-5 so it's a really tough argument that because of Facebook users have to use WhatsApp or FB messenger.
Valid points, they aren't stiffling anyone, you can use others but since everyone is on whatsapp and facebook you have to use them.
I'd hardly call it "cruft" - this is the beauty of computer systems and software - abstraction!
And now your messenger app needs a launcher, switcher, notification manager, search, per-app settings pages, etc. And maybe its own process model/scheduler, to prevent rogue apps from slowing down the messenger app. And apps within the messenger app now need to be cross-messenger-platform on top of being cross-webview-platform.
It's almost like people's expectations for software go up over time.
In the meantime, Facebook still hasn't gotten around to allowing 1-to-1 messages from users on mobile websites, and probably never will. Sharing on your wall, sure, but send something privately? Sorry, we haven't gotten around to fixing that 4-year-old bug yet. (Even weirder, it works fine in desktop browsers...)
What do you mean? Sending messages from mobile to a single user using the messages menu works doesn't it?
I mean from our website, not Facebook's. You can use the Fbook API to share (1-to-many) on mobile websites, but you can't use the "send" functionality to send a private 1-to-1 message. It's surely not a technical issue, I'm assuming Fbook just decided never to implement it.
Let me get this straight. - The phone OS has a shell, usually written in native code. - The messenger app runs on top of the shell, usually written on top of some type of VM. - The messenger app contains a web browser that renders other apps, written in js.
Please, for your own sanity, don't even bother investigating how operating systems actually work.
Aleman360 works for Microsoft on the Windows 10 shell. So I think it's safe to say that Aleman360 knows how operating systems actually work.
And that may be perfectly fine right now. But if they change their TOS tomorrow that says you're not allowed to do that and shut you down because of it you're good and fucked. They have all the users. They have the platform the users are on. Therefore they hold all the cards.
They're unlikely to do that. First, it's practically impossible to enforce a "don't use other messaging platforms" clause. I mean, they'll be pulling in a lot of companies early on that use SMS or similar to interface with customers already. Messenger is just going to be one part of those companies' communication arsenal. Second, if they did, you'd see lawsuits or major players leaving (for the same reason as #1, the…
As I said in my original comment, Twitter made a spectacular show of getting immense traction thanks to their universe of third party developers and then changing their TOS to effectively shut them down once they felt they didn't need them anymore. The situations aren't 100% the same (they never are), but my concerns aren't unfounded.