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