Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

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I get the concern, but they're probably not super brittle because chat apps still need to support old clients. I'd worry more about getting blocked entirely.

I remember chatting with the Meebo founders about some of this. They didn't really have an answer to why AIM, YIM, and MSN Messenger wouldn't block them beyond it being bad for their networks. On how they'd make money, I don't remember hearing any interesting answers. They never really figured out the money thing and ended up getting acquihired by Google.

The did have a crazy-impressive web UI for the mid-2000s; for a while, that know-how was probably their most valuable asset. The need and the market still (and have always) kinda exited, but the players changed a lot in the last 15 years. One of their business ideas was to pivot into a commercial support chat app. People use them today, so maybe they were before their time, or maybe B2B was never in their DNA.

We had a bunch of IPs for each of our servers to get around some of their auto-blocking stuff. Eventually we got approval from AIM but that was fairly late. You're right in that we had crazy-impressive web UI but the backend was also unique in that we had a process running for every logged in user (and eventually we had a process running for every user who was running the iOS app)

Why would chat apps need to support old clients? If facebook pushes out an update almost every user will have it on day one and every user will 1 month on. They can just show an error banner to users who have automatic updates turned on.

My life as a developer would be much easier if every user actually upgraded their apps within a month of updates. In my experience, a substantial proportion of users either have automatic updates disabled and only manually update individual apps when they break, or don’t habitually connect their phones to Wi-Fi, and thus don’t get automatic updates.

It’s why apps like desktop Chrome have extremely aggressive automatic-update schemes which are near-impossible to disable if you’re ever connected to the internet.

You must have different users than I had.

iOS users upgrade pretty quick, but Android users don't. There are lots of phones with not very much storage, so upgrading is painful for users and they turn off auto-updates and don't update frequently.

And when you add on end of life platforms that have enough users you don't want to cut off, but not enough users that you want to do active development, or the platform owner won't sign packages anymore, you have to support some clients for a long time.

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