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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

A different theory:

The ultimate super app is the browser.

The browser is dominant in the west, because we started using the internet with desktop computers, where a website was the ultimate way to reach people.

When mobile started, everyone had to have an app. Surfing the web on mobile at the beginning didn't work that well. At the same time installing apps was a lot easier then on desktop.

In the west, the app model matches the website model. Most popular apps started as websites, later made an app - facebook, youtube ...

In emerging markets, they "skipped" the desktop, started with a smartphone.

Installing apps is still more of a hassle then visiting websites, so a super app makes more sense then a super website.

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Agreed, but the browser never got the identity/contacts bit down. So what would be a relatively simple social app when you can rely on your existing social graph becomes much more complicated and loses out on network effects when it has to be its own completely independent site.

Now, I’m not saying we should have this as a centralized app either. The closest and most interesting thing I’ve seen along these lines in a decentralized approach is https://spritely.institute/

Maybe email could be integrated into the browser better.

Ah yes. Back to the days of Netscape Communicator or AOL.

You can experience this in its modern form (on a Mac or PC) with SeaMonkey or Vivaldi. Arguably Chrome + Sign-in to your Google Account + Gmail and Google Drive would get you there too, although I would never actually sign into Chrome to test that theory.

No, I think you misunderstand me. I don't just mean that the browser contains an email client. I'm replying to a comment pointing out that the browser doesn't support identity and contacts. Email has that and it's an open protocol.

To give you a very narrow example of what it might mean to integrate email into the browser better: Right now, even subscribing to a newsletter is kind of annoying. Type in your email, verify an email you get. If it was integrated better, it might be one click.

That makes sense, and I hadn’t thought of that.

Apple seems to be moving directionally towards something that could be an equal to that experience with Passkeys[1] which I’m personally ambivalent about and want to see what problems crop up first before I trust it. I at least want to see reliable passkey migration first since Microsoft and Google are apparently on board too[2].

[1] https://developer.apple.com/passkeys/

[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/passkeys-more-secure-than-p...

But super app is more problematic than browser: They are closed gardens, you don't have any alternative.

I agree with this problem but it doesn't refute the point being made. This is just an unfortunate consequence of how history has played out. There is no rule or guiding north star in the open market to "limit closed gardens". This is just a philosophy that a minority of people hold.

It's more than that. A market without competition isn't much of a market. We've got more than a few decades of antitrust law and research, and multiple government agencies, focused on preserving competition.

A market does not require an open ecosystem, it just requires competition. These walled gardens compete heavily with each other.

I agree with this theory somewhat. I also think the browser had the runway to become the ultimate open mobile super app, but dropped the ball. For reasons we may never figure out, the browser never evolved beyond its initial incarnation. A mobile browser today is mostly just tabs that view shrunk down web pages. I am still waiting for a true mobile first web experience. This might even require a new kind of web page format.

> For reasons we may never figure out, the browser never evolved beyond its initial incarnation.

The reason is simple, the 30% app store profits. Very low incentives for either of the 2 major players to improve things, and tens of billions of reasons yearly to slow things down.

Exactly.

Still, what happened to FirefoxOS?

It was forked into KaiOS, targeting feature phones and allowing devs to use web technologies for building apps.

You can't blame the app stores or the mobile platforms. The truth is that _anyone_ could re-imagine a web browser and build something brand new and become successful distributing through the store for free.

Apple already foresaw that possibility and banned it . iOS users are forced to use Safari.

I'm waiting for a web first mobile experience. I don't think web pages are the problem, mobile operating systems are. They should, fundamentally, just be browsers. The desktop has space enough for two layers of operating systems - "the" operating system, and the browser. But on mobile that's too confusing.

Agreed. Data privacy and security is so important, especially on mobile since it's our wallet, camera, etc that we need the system to help with permissions, data management etc. It is redundant to have a browser layer AND an operating system layer manage these separately.

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