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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

My question is, how do super apps actually work? On iOS, does the WeChat app actually download an iOS app bundle and execute it? Or does it do something like a browser and execute some kind of markup + interpreted language like JavaScript?

If it’s the former, I thought Apple banned apps in their App Store from doing that. Seems like maybe they made an exception for WeChat..? If so does that exception only exist within China or also in the US?

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WeChat mini apps are javascript model/controller with a markup view https://github.com/apelegri/wechat-mini-program-wiki Think angular & Vue instead of react. Each page has a js, json, stylesheet and xml.

You can technically hack one together but there's an annoying process of getting verified before you can use the IDE and test something on a phone. You also can't really publish anything and see how it goes without a serious plan and a Chinese national ID. There's a small scene of foreigners contributing to wechat apps and even starting some but ultimately control of the app is through a national.

The joke ofc is that browsers are the original super-app, just more poorly monetized (I guess thank pmarca for not being that good atexecution)

The Android Wechat app came bundled with a years-old fork of webview, coz the Android scene is a total mess, various vendors not only never update their system apps, but actually substitute it with their custom versions, this made it unusable and a “Chinese Webview” necessary, so wechat got one, all of Tencent's services use it plus plenty of third party apps, since almost every Android 5+ phone has the latest WeChat and their WebView fork.

So this situation almost made their platform mentality an inevitabily, now they only need to define a set of principles for then to be a mobile OS.

I'd say their applet thing can do 99% of the things a standalone app could, but the development speed , reach and functionality you can get is unmatched, best of all, it's the one true unified cross platform OS: on Android, iOS and Windows, but Chinese market only.

So it's not a super app, it's a mobile OS.

That's how the article qualified it at the end, right? An "Operating System Super App"

It’s the second case, markup + JS.

Apple don't ban web browsers from the App Store either, so I guess their ban is not very strict.

> Apple don't ban web browsers from the App Store

They do, in fact, ban web browsers other than Safari.

I know what you're going to say - "Chrome is available for iOS". It's just Safari with a different UI. All the parsing, rendering and javascript runtime code is Safari.

It's a complete fucking pain, too.

Just to be clear, because apps aren’t allowed to run untrusted code (like random JavaScript in a JIT) via interpreter or compiler, any app that shows web content has to use WebKit-based APIs.

And while WebKit is the HTML and JavaScript engine that Safari uses, browsers on iOS are quite different than Safari.

I often use Brave because I like the UI and it blocks trackers etc. out of the box and certainly has features and UX that’s different than Safari’s.

In my day to day usage, it makes zero difference that Safari and Brave use the same rendering engine on iOS.

I use Brave on iOS too, but it is inferior to real Firefox + uBlock Origin on Android.

To clarify the clarification, there’s a rule on code execution that is only applied selectively. For instead Pythonista of course do execute arbitrary code, as do games running internal code through interpretors etc.

It’s for limited use cases and not a threat to Apple, so it gets a pass.

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