Dan Grover

This is an excellent article, including a section where they compare ordering a pizza via a chatbot and a simple wizard based interface: http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html The wizard was by far the better experience.

You're assuming that typing/talking to a bot is the easiest way to get things done. That's simply not true. We have custom UIs to interface with different domains because different domains work better/more efficiently with different UIs. The following post has an analysis on this, with many great examples in the real world today http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html

What does China actually gain from this? For the government the answer is clear: locally situated companies that they have total control over. WeChat will obviously never pull a Google style "encrypt all the things" - they'll happily help the state reduce the credit scores of political dissidents and anyone who is friends with them. For politically connected cronies (e.g. WeChat owners), the answer is also clear. But if you are just a Chinese citizen, what do you gain? Inferior substitutes for the Google/Facebook/etc infrastructure? Isolation from the rest of the world? [1] This excellent article argues that WeChat's "conversational interface" is just a crude hack around app store restrictions. http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html

Related: a great article series about mobile UI and app trends in China: http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/01/31/more-chinese-mobile-ui-trends.htm… (from a wechat product manager / Silicon Valley transplant)

I wrote a post about this a while back: http://dangrover.com/2010/05/29/indie-developers-and-crossing-the-app-… When I speak of the triumph of the app, I don't mean it as a synonym for "program." That definition has become archaic. I'm talking about "the app" as the unit of software in popular perception. It is the monad. It is the atom. It is the cell. It is the brick. Software is abstract. An app is concrete. Apps obey basic laws. You can install or uninstall their functionality completely. Apps are indivisible. Apps do not come with other apps, they stand alone. Apps do not touch other apps' data without being allowed. In short, the term "app" could best be defined, more broadly, as the finest, most granular level of control over the computing experience that most users can consistently and comfortably exercise.

I agree that a good portion of the valuation must have been largely driven by fear and their potential to destroy that much value rather than create it. The factor that both challenges and supports your argument is how small their team was at acquisition (reportedly 32 engineers, 55 total). Charging $1 a year per user after the first year was bringing in revenue, and it wouldn't take much to be a "traditional business" ie. profitable. They also had zero-rated revenue-sharing deals with Reliance Telecom in India years ago as another potential source of revenue – I suspect relationships like this played a larger role in the acquisition than as they thought they would lay the groundwork for internet.org. Your comment made me curious about what their actual revenues and costs were leading up to the sale. Putting (massive) stock-based compensation expenses aside it looks like their revenues and operating costs were actually pretty close[1]. That's not delving into potential revenue growth connected to payments and B2C interaction following the path which was already being laid out by wechat[2]-Facebook has decided to attempt this with messenger instead of whatsapp. I'm not saying that they would have quickly found enough revenue to justify a $20B valuation, but that it resembled a traditional business a lot more than many other social startups, and they were kept lean and probably better positioned to capitalize on growth than others. [1]…

I don't really understand the motivation behind chat UIs. Dan Grover says it better than I could here: http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html

A related blog entry by a WeChat dev. http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html

This is an essential piece if you're interested in this topic: http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html A lot of the features WeChat offers seem to make sense - it surprised me.

It's a venturebeat repost of http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11557166

I guess something that wechat does is more appropriate for the time being to use in business products... If at all. http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html

This blog post by a developer at WeChat gets into how they're not really chatbots per se: http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html

Also this one from the same author: http://dangrover.com/blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-trends.html

I hear they're big in china. http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/01/31/more-chinese-mobile-ui-trends.htm…

Even though i couldn't imagine any sane person scanning QR codes, in China they are apparently very popular: http://dangrover.com/blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-trends.html…

Pretty sure OP meant this article - read it as well, thought it was very good: http://dangrover.com/blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-trends.html The Chinese market has a lot of beautiful apps (as a designer) - they're a little different from our North American apps, there are definitely a lot of lessons we could crib from them though.

The title link points to the wrong place. It should be: http://dangrover.com/2011/09/13/etude-acquired/ (13, not 11.)

Yes! More along these lines: https://usv.com/post/an-idea-about-texting https://www.ouvre-boite.com/messaging/ https://medium.com/@chrismessina/conversational-commerce-92e0bccfc3ff http://blog.dilbert.com/post/109389515411/your-phone-interface-is-a-le… http://dangrover.com/blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-trends.html… http://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/ A text based or "messaging" UI is often simpler and more effective than fumbling with some complicated direct manipulation UI.