Comment by AnthonyMouse
4 years ago
> They aren’t sticky enough on their own to avoid people just installing the next one. I think I have used 10 of the things at various points but SMS and email are still massively more popular.
That works in a different way. Today you have WhatsApp and Signal. 95% of your friends are on WhatsApp and 5% are on Signal. Now let's say Signal starts taking over. In five years it's the other way around. This is possible because you can install them both on the same device during the transition.
If you buy a kind of phone that can run Signal but not WhatsApp at the time when 95% of your friends are still on WhatsApp, that doesn't work. You're not going to buy that phone right now because your friends haven't moved yet and won't for another five years.
First you have to spend five years getting everyone to switch messaging apps, and even then you can only switch platforms if the next messaging app to become popular runs on the new platform, which it generally doesn't, because nobody writes apps for platforms nobody uses and nobody uses platforms with no apps.
The usual solution to this is something like wine that allows you to run the old platform's apps on the new platform. But Google prevents that by encouraging third party apps to have dependencies on SafetyNet or some other Google services or code that the new platform can't easily implement as a result of excessive complexity or legal restrictions.
Your assuming the market is homogeneous with you. Someone buys their kids phone X because they don’t care. Now their kids friends are forced to use a different app to talk to those kids. Even tiny fraction of the market can force huge numbers of people to install and use a different messaging app.
The effect is like crystallization even if 99.99999% of a mixture is in state X only a tiny seed is needed because it’s a one way conversion. People have a reason to install app Y, and no real need to use app X over app Y but they do have a reason to use app Y over app X.
You don't get any crystallization when the people with the old phones can run both apps. The one kid gets the new phone, he convinces five of his closest friends to install that app, then those five people have both apps installed and use the other one to talk to the other billion people on the old app, none of which have any reason to switch.
Meanwhile the first kid could only convince five out of twenty friends to install the new app, and also couldn't run some other apps the new platform doesn't have, and then complains to the parents to return that phone and get a different one.
You say that like there isn’t any other popular apps for people to be switching to. Facebook messenger almost as popular for example and it isn’t like this would only happen to 1 family on the planet.
Further people often switch clients even when they have friends on the old platform simply because it’s the new thing. That’s how all the current major messaging platforms took off, none of them are very old.
2 replies →
> Today you have WhatsApp and Signal. 95% of your friends are on WhatsApp and 5% are on Signal.
I asked google:
I know this is not completely central to your point, but it does speak to a part of what you're saying in that the choices are typically not binary.