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AI is going to kill app subscriptions

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Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#241

Post by adithyassekhar »

dangus wrote: post #238
adithyassekhar wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is a poor example here especially with how more and more features are moved from the OS to Play services. Google is shipping so many features without even an OS update that's how Android has always been. Even for their OS, Pixel feature drops happen every quarter. AOSP is only a base for others to build anyway, have you seen how fast samsung and others are pushing updates and uncountable number of features. I…

Okay, I agree with your premise, but can you point to some tangible acceleration in innovation. Are these Google Play features coming out faster than they used to in a way that coincides with AI adoption?

Not really no. It's pretty much the same pace as before. I wanted to point out Android is not playing catch up to iOS in anyway in features or quality, it's the opposite. Your comment asked why Google isn't catching up to Apple with AI's help. iOS meanwhile has been regressing since 18 and is a mess now on 26.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#242

Post by topocite »

sunir wrote: post #66

After the dot.com, there was the O-pocalypse that terrified me as a recent grad. - Open source - Outsourcing - Offshoring It was driving the labour cost of an engineer to zero I felt as a young man. Then time passed, and I learnt that engineers aren't paid to code. Engineers are paid to solve problems for a business. If you recall, the dot.com bust and 9/11 crashed finances for a few years. When the money printing gu…

What happened last time is exactly what will never happen again because those were all specific one off, path dependent, moments in time.

I think what you are missing is that it might not be possible to stay in business if you can't use AI to solve problems.

Before the dot com bust, I was paid in college to file papers in file cabinets all day at an office. Ten years on from that, the paper was gone, the file cabinets were gone, obviously the paper filer job was gone and even that business that employed me as a paper filer was gone because they were a dinosaur who couldn't leverage technology well and were put out of business by competitors who could.

There is huge denial on this board that everything is going to be fine hand coding on the legacy systems of dinosaur companies. Seems more likely that if the company has so much technical systems debt that models aren't useful, those companies are not going to be competitive in their area of business.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#243

Post by dangus »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #241
dangus wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I agree with your premise, but can you point to some tangible acceleration in innovation. Are these Google Play features coming out faster than they used to in a way that coincides with AI adoption?

Not really no. It's pretty much the same pace as before. I wanted to point out Android is not playing catch up to iOS in anyway in features or quality, it's the opposite. Your comment asked why Google isn't catching up to Apple with AI's help. iOS meanwhile has been regressing since 18 and is a mess now on 26.

Yes, to clarify, I’m not making any claim on Android versus Apple and which one is better, who is catching up to whom. Which operating system is ahead or better is essentially irrelevant to the point I’m making.

My main claim revolves around your second sentence: Google is a major primary source of AI research and has access to frontier models before all their customers, especially competitors like Apple who are clearly behind in the AI race and/or not participating in the same way.

In theory, if AI is transformational to developer velocity, Android and all other products under Google’s umbrella should be moving faster than competitors that don’t have early access and preferential wholesale cost AI infrastructure, and they should be clearly iterating faster and better than they did prior to ~2022-2024.

To me, the biggest argument for an AI bubble burst is that companies like Meta and Google won’t actually be able to show their prospective customers that their own workflows have benefitted. Google can’t say “we now ship major [Google Product] features n% faster/better” because there’s no evidence of it. They might make the claim but nobody will believe them.

Major corporations will try the products, start spending $20-200 per engineer per month extra, they’ll see productivity gains of Essentially, this experience will be the most common one: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1r6olcv/an...

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#244

Post by Ronrey »

Solo founder running 56 microservices and 69 autonomous agents in production. AI collapsed the build cost by 40-60x, but every architecture decision, security boundary, and ops choice still required experience. The article gets the direction right but the conclusion wrong — subscriptions don't die, per-seat pricing does. When agents are doing the work instead of humans clicking dashboards, you price

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#245

Post by adithyassekhar »

dangus wrote: post #243
adithyassekhar wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really no. It's pretty much the same pace as before. I wanted to point out Android is not playing catch up to iOS in anyway in features or quality, it's the opposite. Your comment asked why Google isn't catching up to Apple with AI's help. iOS meanwhile has been regressing since 18 and is a mess now on 26.

Yes, to clarify, I’m not making any claim on Android versus Apple and which one is better, who is catching up to whom. Which operating system is ahead or better is essentially irrelevant to the point I’m making. My main claim revolves around your second sentence: Google is a major primary source of AI research and has access to frontier models before all their customers, especially competitors like Apple who are clea…

This I do agree with. All I've seen is reducing headcounts and forcing people to take up other roles as well.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#246

Post by hattmall »

camdenreslink wrote: post #121
hxugufjfjf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it’s not their business to sell a chat app? "Our company is the frontier lab for AI models, oh and btw we also offer SlackClone, sign up for enterprise please". Their job is selling shovels, really good, increasingly more expensive shovels that keep getting better, let others waste their time looking for gold.

But they are marketing their AI as replacing all software engineers. Their CEO can’t stop saying it. According to them the cost of producing software is now just the cost of tokens to generate it. They have special knowledge to leverage AI to clone (and even improve) huge revenue businesses with high margin. If their claims about the abilities of LLMs are accurate it would be foolish to just leave that on the table.…

They care about money, they are making tons of investor money doing what they are doing, there's no incentive to pivot if it would just turn investor money into consumer money.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#248

Post by knollimar »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #203
jacobjjacob wrote: post #156

No one should be charging $10/month for a local PDF editor anyways… but I don’t think AI will solve that

I've got the PDF specification on my desk at the moment. 1200 pages of vague details on the format. I don't know why you expect to get a product that works with that for nothing.

It's crazy that we think the software is simple just because someone made it already.
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