[Theodores]

The particular one is YouTube as there is a large back catalogue of stuff.

WhatsApp is the one you needed to mention, if you have that then you are locked into a phone number based service.

Apps can go to PWA mode, if you think of the business case for a third party app going PWA then it is a good one - ease of adoption as no need to install.

If Huawei wanted to they could host videos and offer better monetisation to content creators. If you get notifications that your favourite channels have new stuff does it matter what logo is at the top of the page?

If the deal was a good one to upload the entire back catalogue to HuaweiTube then it could work. People already are used to uploading their blog post to half a dozen different places, no reason why people could not do this with video painlessly on Huawei 5G.

People who release stuff early on Patreon could be customers for this.

If HuaweiTube also allowed you to do images - as per Instagram and messaging all in one neat service (treating images as single frame videos and audio as video with no pictures) then it could be a better service.

I think that WhatsApp is the rub, people can go to the web version of Facebook on a Huawei phone, they don't need the app.

[cameronbrown]

People have tried to replace YouTube for decades. The platform is too sticky. Even if you solve the immense issue of content streaming at scale, ad monetisation is Google's kingdom, charging for content doesn't work, donations don't work, etc.. it's just not feasible. Their web/mobile apps are also light heads ahead.

Regardless of the shitty things YouTube's done, there's a reason it's still so popular.

We also really need to preserve the back catalogue. There's so much invaluable stuff only on YouTube.

[Theodores]

Nobody has forked out a billion dollars for paying people to make YouTube grade videos, if Huawei had a rival service and booked every single ad slot then I think that they could either lose a billion dollars or foster a new platform.

YouTube isn't massively integrated into other services, if you had one platform that did email, video hosting, Patreon things and still image things then I think it could work.

If the on-boarding is with your device, as per how it is with Android then why could it not work?

The goal posts change all the time. Because MicroSoft failed at it doesn't mean they would fail if they did the same today. Or if some other player did.