WeChat's App Revolution • Hacker News Board

Re: WeChat's App Revolution

#101

Post by teknologist » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 8:52 AM UTC

yousry wrote: post #34

nneonneo wrote: post #14

WeChat's "App Revolution" is by no means a technical revolution, as several other commenters have pointed out. There's nothing new with embedding a web browser, nor with SSO, or integrated payments. The revolution is the fact that this is an app with an install base approaching one billion users (846M monthly active users as of Q3'16). Anything they do is potentially revolutionary by virtue of sheer scale. They are a…

Calling a competitor to Apple, Facebook and Co "unstoppable juggernaut" is sarcasm, isn't it?

One thing is for sure: the Great Firewall is unstoppable in its blocking of Facebook, Google and co.

Re: WeChat's App Revolution

#102

Post by teknologist » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 8:53 AM UTC

robjan wrote: post #62

Markoff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not similar, WeChat competition is blocked by Chinese government, kakao operates in free market

Is it? There are alternatives to WeChat which are not blocked by the great firewall. For instance, although not comparable, I am able to use WhatsApp perfectly well without the use of a VPN.

It's rather slow and photo uploads consistently fail for me. There's a very noticeable difference in speed (hence usability)

Re: WeChat's App Revolution

#103

Post by candiodari » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 10:50 AM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #27

ec109685 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you should take it as a given that decentralization of login is good. I do not want my credentials stored on every personalized web site that I go to, so appreciate when I can sign in with one of my existing ids.

It doesn't have to work that way. You choose which domain you'd like to be responsible for holding your identity and address book, and then choose to authenticate with some domains and host some of your data on them. Those domains each get a different user id from your identity server, which knows all your user ids on each of those other domains. Now you have a bunch of ids in different communities but no one except…

All that telling people sounds like a lot of work. Also how does discovery work ? All these approaches seem to push nothing by default but that's not that useful.

Re: WeChat's App Revolution

#104

Post by josepi_ » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 12:58 PM UTC

This is the sort-of obvious eventuality of a world filled with dozens of different services. Of course a new service will come that tries to bridge them all together in a simple way that is efficient for the user. Imagine if all the USA's cable channels were different apps that took up space on your TV's hard drive (like phone applications). Now imagine your TV has a way of visiting "lesser" channels (web browser). Now imagine that, eventually, the channels you care about begin integrating into the web browser (the numerous applications that now offer browser-based components). Now imagine someone comes along and says you can use a single service to access all those channels (shouldn't be hard to imagine that because it's how things are now..).

The innovation here, imo, is that WeChat is essentially a web browser that looks and feels very different from traditional web browsers. It's a big deal given the conditions of today; i.e. cloud-based and browser-based applications are becoming the norm. Interesting, for sure. I see a future in it, anyway.