Zoom app dock: Congratulations, your app has apps in it now | Hacker News Reader

Zoom app dock: Congratulations, your app has apps in it now

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68 pointsgbrayut62 comments

This author seems shocked by this turn of events--with websites trying to be app platforms with embedded web views of websites--as if they are a recent phenomenon... have we all forgotten the (thankfully pretty short) time 15 years ago where everything that mattered suddenly had to be a Facebook app?

And 15 years before that when most internet users would launch apps from an AOL portal.

With browsers trying to obscure URLs now, we're also headed back to AOL keywords, along with the walled garden of our firewalls.

I remember the thankfully now extinct, era of browser toolbar add-ons... yikes

It took me a while stumbling around their settings (maybe dark pattern alert) to figure out how to disable this for your team if you're an admin.

* Navigate to https://us06web.zoom.us/profile/setting

* Click on "Zoom Apps"

* Toggle the "Zoom Apps Quick Launch Button" sliders.

This took me about 30 min to figure out because all the emails from Zoom about how to 'manage' this was a link to their marketplace which is an upsell to add apps, not to disable it. HTH someone else.

“ Wow is the web a weird application delivery mechanism where people are writing applications and then essentially compiling them down to binaries using WebAssembly, but weirdly shoehorning it into a hypertext framework”

I thought this was an interesting quote from the article that relates back to something I’ve been thinking about as I’ve started to look at writing apps that run any where and realized that forces you into writing a web app, but web apps kind of suck because at the end of the day you’re really writing a website not an app…

I wonder if you could at this point reinvent the browser so it was specialized for web apps not sites, and what that would even look like.

That distinction doesn't matter all that much today. The entire "hypertext framework" part of most single page apps is a generic 10-line index.html. The app bundle can be downloaded and cached indefinitely and work perfectly even offline. This specialized browser for web apps not sites would look like – Chrome.

>> The entire "hypertext framework" part of most single page apps is a generic 10-line index.html.

This statement seems rather misleading. There ultimately ends up being vastly more hypertext delivered to the browser than can be represented by a 10-line html file.

I don’t know enough about non-web apps. What sucks about web apps? Speed is definitely a part of it, but I always saw that as a cost of interoperability.

FYI because it's something of a hidden feature: you can close the Apps dock with the ⋮ vertical dots at the bottom right of the screen!

Probably registers as a positive usage metric for the app bar.

Bingo. Engagement = Good! (even if the engagement is accidental or out of frustration) The line goes up!

Or you can make it go away completely with: https://zoom.us/profile/setting and search for 'apps'. Turn off "Zoom Apps Quick Launch Button" and I believe that makes the dock go away, too.

Not permanently. I’m finding that I have to close it on ‘every’ call.

It has an option to "auto open", which you can deselect.

There are lots of existing and aspiring superapps out there.

It might be new to OP

I have never heard of any of the apps in the new app dock.

Always join zoom from browser

This is quite a tangent but...

> Zoom, the app for ensuring the knowledge worker parts of an economy continue to work when there’s a pandemic,

How did Zoom achieve this status? I had literally never used or heard of Zoom at home or at work prior to the pandemic, and now many treat it as synonymous with video chat the way that workplaces use Slack for text chat. Was there some crazy marketing strategy?

Yes, they allowed companies and public institutions to sign up and use the product for free with quick on boarding. They basically set up a "use now pay later" approach where they allowed lots of leeway to let you figure out need and payments down the road.

The competition were charging by the user (you had to commit to some user license number) and you had to go through the regular onboarding process. Zoom was like you let us know what you need later. Let’s get you up and running and we’ll work out details later.

And you could invite anyone, i.e. external 'users'/customers, whoever. Webex allowed that, but not e.g. Teams, which many would already have been paying for via Office365 (ironic name to have and lose on this one).

Well, google was busy only supporting chrome browser for hangouts (yes you could have video in FF but it wouldn’t support blurring or any other advanced features it did in chrome), and Microsoft kept failing with Skype for Business.

End of day, when you needed an app for video conferencing that worked for everyone, your choice was mostly zoom.

And now we are here

That's another question: when did blurring become a thing? It mostly sucks, and it feel like it's not that hard to make sure that you are fine with what's in your back... If you are not, just don't enable the video, right?

Lots of people ended up suddenly working from home with little to no warning and had to make do with whatever home environment they had available, whether they had a home office or not. The simplest, least intrusive professional option was to use blur.

A lot of people are required to enable video to keep their job.

true, I worked at a place that was super-anal about always having video on all the time. Funny enough, bigger companies I worked at often don't care. But it's probably good for "visibility" anyway.

Because the bar was pretty low. GoToMeeting, WebEx, etc, were all significantly worse in UI, video stability, features, etc.

Google Meet was there before the pandemic, and Jitsi (for an open source alternative) too.

Companies needed interoperability (sales, vendor conversations, etc) really fast in the pandemic and not being Google, Microsoft, etc., helped Zoom in a big way.

Google meet wasn’t far behind - but it was behind in quality vs zoom. And it wants to herd every user into getting a google account - if you wanted to just meet online with a random group of people zoom had the fewest hurdles.

The simplicity of a non-ecosystem user joining is the key to zoom success.

They were well-positioned at the beginning of the pandemic, mainly because their client applications were so easy to install (in large part because of how they circumvented OS security features). Other solutions are better now, but they were in the right place at the right time.

It was in the right place at the right time. I had used zoom quite a bit before the pandemic. It was a great alternative to Google hangouts--it ran instantly from your browser and required very little fuss or setup (unlike Skype or desktop apps). Google killed and messed up their video chat apps and zoom was the only real option when the pandemic hit.

no idea, subjectively I always liked hangouts (or whatever the crap it's called this week) much better.

Also, everyone's on gmail anyway so surprising google somehow just missed the boat on this huge competitor.

I don't believe they had any marketing. It's just that no other app was doing group video calls for free at that scale and with that quality at the start of the pandemic. It was the perfect no fuss solution available at the perfect time. Just create a call and copy over the link to whoever you want without them having to create an account.

The alternative, WebEx, was even crappier at the time.

That was not 'the' alternative. Skype, Teams (which subsumed it), Jitsi (which we used as a partially remote team prior to the pandemic and then inexplicably switched from to Zoom during), Discord was just starting to leak out of gamer-sphere, I think Slack already had group video calls, etc.

In California where I live it was. Skype was used by virtually no one. Teams and Jitsi were minor players. Google meet did not yet have traction. Most companies were using WebEx.

So as you say, most were already using something non-Zoom, that's the up-thread point - where did Zoom come from.

Also I doubt Teams was a minor player, in usage maybe but not availability - it has a free tier I think but otherwise comes with O365, which is obviously not minor. Having it doesn't mean you use Teams, but it does mean that it ought to be an obvious choice if you suddenly, newly, have a need for a product like that, as so many companies did.

For what it's worth here in France every company I've worked at had o365 licences for email and everyone uses teams. I work as a sysadmin.

WebEx. Lol

Camera and mic worked without setup a lot more reliably in zoom than other platforms.

Multiple nested instances of marketplaces? We're getting close, soon the tower will fall and we'll go back to writing raw HTML in uppercase tags.

I’ll eat your lunch with my DHTML. Maybe a bit of Java for the trickier multimedia bits.

I still remember the first time I made an image change to another image using the “onmouseover” attribute. It was a magical time.

DHTML, that’s some old school lingo. Lol.

No joke, this was one of the first O'Reilly books I bought:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/javascript-dhtml/059600...

Pfft, no one uses DHTML any more, AJAX is the wave of the future!

http://lemmings.280284.com/

Congrats Zoom! You are now a platform. Take a close look at the EU DMA legislation. :)

would love to hear a bit more detail on what this comment means, how it affects Zoom, etc etc.

Step 2: Zoom detects what website/app you're screen-sharing and charges Google / Microsoft / Miro etc a fee to enable "Ultra HD" for Zoom users when that site is showing on the screen (or they can join the New Zoom App Partner Program™ and publish the site as an app -- for a small revenue share fee of course)

Step 3: Tons of people stop using Zoom when the Word document they are trying to share becomes unreadable.

Reminder: the zoom desktop app has a history of terrible security practices and should not be installed on any machine with data you intend to keep private; use the (hidden with dark patterns) web version instead and never give these people access to your computer.

Seconded. Use the web app, and when you're the one choosing the meeting technology choose more open alternatives like Jitsi (which doesn't even require an account for everyone).

Zoom also doesn't require an account for everyone.

Fair point, thanks for the correction.

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

I thought the end goal of every company is to become a bank. Valve and Starbucks managed to become banks.

and the goal, the dream, of every human is to live off charging for rent

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