I read an article in the New York Times about Elon Musk wanting to make X, formally known as Twitter, into an everything app. The article also mentions other attempts. Would that be the last thing we would want?
I can see why Elon would want it: total domination of the app market and massive profits. While a user might find it convenient, it would be a total lock in to one app that would make it difficult to move to other apps. If the app went under, a likelihood for X under Elon’s control, the user becomes completely disconnected. The app would also be the dream target of hackers trying to steal all you data.
It’s not that hard to use multiple apps. I’m sure most of us have dozens of them. I have high security on my financial apps and not so much on my social apps. I don’t want to do two step verification to get back into kbin every time I get logged out. Specialize apps for specific purposes makes a lot more sense to me.
We already have an Everything App that allows you to execute all the different functions of your phone, it’s called the operating system. The proposed app would just be a smaller, shittier OS with fewer functions and no choices. Elon is a failed Steve Jobs—which is depressing because Jobs was also a charlatan—who thinks “what if it was one thing” is actually the answer the all technology, because he doesn’t understand technology as well as he thinks. Pro tip: carrying around 1 device instead of a cell phone, a pager, an mp3 player, and a PDA is helpful. Consolidating different functions that have no reason to interplay with each other into a big mess is not.
tl;dr it’s shit from a butt
Yep. Musk is basing his idea about having an “everything app” on WeChat’s success in China, which basically does what he’s talking about. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to understand that there are cultural differences at play between Chinese users and western users that prevent mass-adoption of a single app to do everything in the west, and that WeChat already exists and isn’t popular in the west at all.
There are more than cultural differences. WeChat is a surveillance app for the masses by the State. This is not an exaggeration.
Is it a cultural difference, or is it a combination of China being a more restricted market and the first wave of smart phone apps being aimed primarily at the English-speaking world? I am sure some of the apps that Westerners use were not available in China, either because they weren’t allowed (e.g. financial services) or were not aimed at that market (e.g. Twitter), at least not initially.
Reminds me of how in high school, my different friend groups used different IM clients, but it was just a fluke of which gained mass appeal first in each community.
He has like zero credibility ethically or technologically speaking. Who would anybody in the right mind go all in on some bullshit system he’s pushing? Especially something so hypothetically pervasive in your life.
Only his nuthuggers and the weirdos who will never be able to quit Twitter would be on board.
