[ycapplication]

It appears to me that your critique may be of capitalism/free enterprise which extends far beyond the scope of apps. It's quite a big topic to unfold, but in the example you provided, stagnation and a lack of convergence on what constitutes the ideal app are low hanging fruit to be addressed.

Note that in some industries the benefits of shared utility clearly outweigh those of competition, the classic example being infrastructure.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

[miguelrochefort]

Diversity and competition is good as a creative process to discover value. However, this doesn't scale very well, and unification is eventually necessary. My position might sound extreme, but I intend it more as a guideline than as a law that should be enforced. I'm 100% in favor of free market and opposed to coercion.

I think that people don't believe or even consider that such a system could exist, which explains why nothing of the sort exists today. I'm interested in starting a discussion to evaluate possible approaches to this problem.

[ycapplication]

I don't think it's extreme and I think many people favor such a system on a categorical basis.

How do you know when all creative value has been unveiled and it's time for convergence? I would argue that the very nature of creativity makes this perhaps impossible to answer and best attempts to do so in the categories that you mentioned would be at best local maxima.

If I'm understanding the main issue you've raised, it's that utility would be higher from the productivity gains under a single agreed upon platform than exists today due to productivity limitations from fragmentation. There may be an equilibrium point, and I'm not convinced the market isn't fairly decent at finding it. Look at how difficult it's been for other vendors to enter the smartphone market and how quickly developers were willing to abandon Blackberry to decrease their development costs. I wouldn't be surprised if economic forces favor unification and that many hope for ecosystem diversity at the cost of lost utility/productivity for long term benefit. Thiel certainly argues the former in his recent book.

[miguelrochefort]

You are correct. The market will decide these things. What's missing today is an architecture that allows seamless/automatic branching and merging. When you must manually consider whether it's time to branch or merge, you've already lost.

Funny you mention Peter Thiel. I decided to post this just after listening to a podcast featuring Peter Thiel. I agree with him regarding competition.