Comment by AnthonyMouse
4 years ago
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.
You're still not addressing the underlying problem.
People switch to new messengers sometimes, true. But the next one isn't going to be yours unless you have a surplus of luck in addition to skill. The next one is with high probability going to be someone else's.
The real problem is that when it happens, you need the new one to support the new platform. Which it doesn't have any incentive to do when nobody uses the new platform. Convincing the next one to be on your platform is the same problem as convincing the existing one. The transition has nothing to do with it.
I am not saying winning is easy there’s probably hundreds of thousands of messaging apps written. I am saying winning isn’t worth nearly as much as people think.
Consider even just adding advertisements is enough to eventually lose the top spot because there is so much competition.