hungrybread

That’s so interesting! Thanks so much for all the context and screenshots.

The video talks about clutter design giving reassurance by giving more information, but there’s more reassurance (IMO) in the knowledge that by encapsulating these apps, Alipay is essentially vouching for them.

That does seem appealing, especially with the alternative being to Google for details and hope the reviews you find are legit/not bought.

And the kicker is: the service Alipay provides is free for us as users. They don’t charge transaction fees, even when exchanging currencies… Apart from the core infrastructure and government services, the sub apps pay to be sub apps.

It’s really interesting that they aren’t trying to make both the end user and subapp company pay to interact, that’s refreshing.

I wrote out a whole thing/rant about how providing core services to the people and market all seem like a no brainer, but it got a bit convoluted. Long story short, this all looks pretty interesting, I’ll definitely check it out more.

Last thing, having ads you opt in to see, that are worth looking for, seems so nice. Everything is an ad now, where it’s google or any other generic product review site. It’s exhausting having to determine if any info you find online is legit enough to be useful.

Totally agreed about that. It’s called the Principle of Least Surprise for a reason. Users don’t want to learn your software, they just want to achieve their goal in an easy way. Inertia and convention guide all that.

Super scattered thoughts incoming

Guess it depends on your target audience, the best app is the one that your users want to use (or have to use if you’re into that kind of thing).

I wish the video had some specific walkthroughs of using multiple large features in a super app, like the super app version of their example of opening 4+ apps to get a friends coffee. Is it faster / more seamless? I don’t doubt that it is or could be, I just haven’t used any of the super apps.

Feels like a vim vs emacs situation. I love vim, it’s fast and has all the text editing tools I need, but emacs ships with an irc client and tetris which is dope.

Modern American app and web design is surprisingly meh. The ideal is nice (responsive to various screen sizes, accessible) , but most sites fail all over the place (I’ve never worked with anyone who knows accessibility well, myself included). Plus, there is so much dead, empty space on desktop sites. Not sure that hyper cluttered would be good for new users or my ADHD, but I can see the appeal.

Good luck with your project! Mind if I ask what it is?

Exactly! Blockchain and PoW are terrible but id really like to know how much time and electricity is consumed to serve ads, cool servers, train and educate people to effectively become ad engineers.

This comment feels like a Poes Law situation… surely this is a bit, right?