I think Gruber was simply wrong when he said this, off the top of my head, Line and Grab are pretty good candidates for "everything apps." There are probably more.
The logic behind the emergence of these apps is pretty simple. An app store is a walled garden everyone is forced to use. An app's popularity on the store is self-reinforcing, it tends to snowball. If you get a really big app going with a lot of installs, why not add more services to make more money from those installs? Then maybe all those services have some kind of referral incentive and you snowball even more...
There are different hurdles in different markets but I see absolutely no reason this concept couldn't take off in the West. (Bloat and bad UX would prevent it? That's a joke right?)
> I see absolutely no reason this concept couldn't take off in the West.
It could, but it would require the government to require use of the everything app in some way. In the west, there are so many choices for payments and messaging. Yes the snowballing you describe exists, but requires an immense amount of gravity - that at this point only Apple and Google really have.
The logic behind the emergence of these apps is pretty simple. An app store is a walled garden everyone is forced to use. An app's popularity on the store is self-reinforcing, it tends to snowball. If you get a really big app going with a lot of installs, why not add more services to make more money from those installs? Then maybe all those services have some kind of referral incentive and you snowball even more...
There are different hurdles in different markets but I see absolutely no reason this concept couldn't take off in the West. (Bloat and bad UX would prevent it? That's a joke right?)