[hn_throwaway_99]

For any critical tech platform, though, has there ever been more than 2 major players? I would argue that everyone after the top two is such a huge way behind that they really only serve niche markets. Look at Windows Phone, which eventually ended up being a pretty nice OS. MS couldn't pay people enough, quite literally, to get developers to build for it. Any "non-Google Android" clone is going to have to deal with the way developers are deep into Google Play Services, at least in the West, and that will be extremely difficult to displace.

[bduerst]

Yes.

Blackberry in mobile OS share had it for a while, though I'm sure you'd argue that it doesn't exist anymore, but you had asked about ever, not just right now. Video game consoles are another example, with the Nintendo, Xbox, Playstation.

In just about every market there exists two natural economic leaders - the quantity (a.k.a. cost) and the quality leaders. There are market leaders other than the natural two who can arise through other means, such as ecosystem lock-in, tech patents, brand exclusivity, or some other method.

[laumars]

Before smartphones monopolised the market, there was a good variety of handsets to choose from (still is if you look at things from a hardware perspective).

Same was true for micro computers all throughout the 80s and up to mid 90s.

Games consoles, cars, TVs, laptop OEMs, enterprise cloud hosting providers, etc.

So plenty of counter examples.

[ssivark]

And yet China has parallel search engines, chat platforms, e-commerce platforms and social networks. A billion people make a big enough target audience to enable a lot of things.

[toxik]

Rofl, none of the Chinese copies are better than their originals. The only reason there are Chinese variants is protectionism a la firewall.

[solstice]

I disagree with your first sentence in its sweeping overgeneralization. The second sentence seems somewhat true but there's a reason why eBay failed in China: they ported their English website over without consideration for the idiosyncrasies if the chinese market and netizen.

These two sentence are also not intrinsically linked. Just because there has been protectionism does not mean that the China apps are automatically worse. In fact, a bunch of features of weibo and we chat have found their way to Twitter and WhatsApp. (One example are voice messages which were a core part of wechat from the start. They were important to get people in rural areas or older people to use the app, due to the difficulties of typing Mandarin, especially dialects.)

[toxik]

Voice messages have been around since before smartphones, come on.

There is little reason to expect companies that have had multi-national success not to succeed in China if it weren't for protectionism; while there are certainly examples of poor execution, you'd have to be blind to think that was the reason for every such case, or even a significant portion thereof.

[usaar333]

That's not entirely true. WeChat in many ways is more impressive than whatever US equivalent is for a Chinese audience. And Didi executed far better than Uber without protectionism being in play. It's nontrivial to execute in a foreign culture to your own.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Indeed, Chinese apps have diverged significantly from what's used in the West. There were a bunch of Chinese copycat apps at first, but some of them have been supplanted by new and very different apps. Everyone in China used to be on a Facebook copycat called "Ren Ren," but it's gone the way of MySpace, and everyone is now on WeChat, which has no equivalent in the West.

[c256]

> WeChat, which has no equivalent in the West Facebook has been very transparent recently about their intent to ‘fix’ this.

[joejerryronnie]

Didi may have executed better than Uber, but there was pretty significant informal protectionism going on, as well.

[adrianN]

Chinese companies always have the Chinese market where they can grow until they're important enough that people want to be compatible with them.

[adventured]

It doesn't actually work that way. If it did, Baidu would have half the global market for search. Instead, they've stagnated after maxing out in China and Google has continued to expand globally.

Ctrip (20 years old) doesn't have a consequential business outside of China, where Booking and others are dominant. Ctrip's business is firewalled inside of China.

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram dominate globally, while eg WeChat has stagnated outside of China. WeChat's growth started to flatline about three years ago. Within another year they'll go entirely flat on growth (stalled at just over a billion monthly active users, most of which are in China and a few other countries).

Spotify and Apple own the global streaming music business. China's competitors are heavily domestic.

Netflix, Amazon and Disney (+Hulu) will own the global streaming movies & TV business.

Almost nobody outside of China listens to or can understand Chinese music, movies or TV shows. Outside of China it's a small market for their media content. This is a fundamental that can't be overcome, the world is not going to learn Mandarin.

On video gaming, China can never compete because there's a vast amount of content the Chinese Government will simply never allow. They barely allow their own video game giants like Tencent to function properly within China, it's a nightmare. The gaming segment will continue to be dominated by the US, Europe and Japan. As in the other cases, China's gaming companies are hamstrung by their system. The best they can do is buy foreign assets and try to operate them outside of China.

When it comes to social, China can never compete due to their extreme speech, cultural & political controls. There can be no global Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Imgur, et al. China's regressive approach is so extreme they've banned joke apps - that one ban probably wipes out a third of the social media landscape in terms of usage. You never have to worry about a Chinese company competing with you if you're eg Imgur or Twitter.

There is some potential for shopping & goods trade, however even mighty Alibaba has struggled in their quest for expanding outside of the domestic Chinese market.

[throwmex]

All those made in China apps have a hard time penetrating non Chineese markets. But they could if they want to, like TikTok which is popular in India too.

[devoply]

Maybe. But really displacing any of those services is maybe 10,000 developers away... we already have F-droid what if you co-opted it to publish commercial apps for no fees. What if you set 10,000-20,000 developers to work on an open source fork that was run by the Linux foundation? What if you made a real effort to make it truly open source and free? Would people jump ship? It's possible. No one has tried or had the resources to try. And Google becomes more and more entrenched.

[scarface74]

“Publish commercial apps for no fees”?

Processing payments costs real money. Who should subsidize it to make it free for publishers?

[devoply]

Let's see 3% payment cost vs 30% fees... If they wanted to just charge the transaction cost. And yes there are cost centers and profit centers. If you want to eat the cost of something you could do it. And once it becomes successful maybe you start raising fees slowly to catch up to that 30%. Many strategies are possible.

[scarface74]

And are the employees suppose to work for free?

[zrm]

> For any critical tech platform, though, has there ever been more than 2 major players?

Here's a partial list of major server operating system vendors over the years: IBM, Sun, HP, Red Hat, Novell, Microsoft ...

Everyone one of those has existed since at least the 1990s and it's rare for the largest individual vendor to have more than 30% share at any given time.

The key to maintaining this is common interfaces. You write against POSIX or Qt or Java and it runs on most systems even though they're all different vendors.

But all of that stuff comes from the little guys. All the Unix vendors got together to create POSIX because then developers get access to more users by targeting POSIX than Win32, even though Windows at the time had more market share than any individual Unix. Sun creating Java allowed developers with mostly Windows customers to write their Windows applications in Java, which then gave them Mac and a dozen other platforms for free, including Sun Solaris, which the developer probably wouldn't have targeted on its own.

The phone hardware vendors could take a page out of that book and create their own modern POSIX for mobile to replace the Google-specific APIs on Android. Heck, they would only need one implementation of it, the same as all the old Unix vendors have largely standardized on Linux today.