Top all-time · #1847
Dan Grover
Personal blog · dangrover.com · on HN as dangroverdesignstartups
Dan Grover's personal blog at dangrover.com covers design and startups. Since 2010, 42 different Hacker News readers have linked it 56 times, most often “Bots won't replace apps, only better apps will replace apps”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Dan Grover is an engineer, designer, and product leader living between Portland and Oakland.
Most-linked posts?
- Bots won't replace apps, only better apps will replace apps14 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2016-04-20
- Chinese Mobile UI Trends9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2014-12-01
- More Chinese Mobile UI Trends8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-02-07
- /blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-trends.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-02-22
- Chinese Apps Handled Covid-192 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-04-06
What Hacker News says?
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-92e... http://blog.dilbert.com/post/109389515411/your-phone-interfa... http://dangrover.com/blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-t... http://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/ A text based or "messaging" UI is often simpler and more effecti…
Comment linking /blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-trends.html
on “Magic”Submitted Bots won't replace apps, only better apps will replace apps as a story · 260 points
HN discussionI called this like 2 years ago. I am still waiting for better apps. http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps....
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html
on “Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?”Submitted More Chinese Mobile UI Trends as a story · 222 points
HN discussionI 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....
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html
on “Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot”Submitted Chinese Mobile UI Trends as a story · 180 points
HN discussionThis 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.... The wizard was by far the better experience.
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html
on “Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot”Submitted Toward a Grand Unified Theory of n00bs as a story · 124 points
HN discussionThis is an essential piece if you're interested in this topic: http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.... A lot of the features WeChat offers seem to make sense - it surprised me.
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html
on “Mary Meeker's 2016 Internet Trends Report [pdf]”Submitted Whistling Into a Tape Recorder: What the East Coast Doesn't Get About Startups as a story · 113 points
HN discussionI 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 busine…
Comment linking /blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-trends.html
on “Jan Koum: “I couldn't agree more with everything [Apple] said””Submitted Code and Creative Destruction as a story · 100 points
HN discussionWhat 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. Bu…
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html
on “Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor”Submitted Indie Developers and Crossing the App Store Chasm as a story · 95 points
HN discussionThis 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....
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html
on “The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots”Submitted Show HN: My iPad app Etude got acquired by Steinway & Sons as a story · 35 points
HN discussionI wrote a post about this a while back: http://dangrover.com/2010/05/29/indie-developers-and-crossin... 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 ba…
Comment linking /2010/05/29/indie-developers-and-crossing-the-app-store-chasm/
on “Mac OS X.7 "Lion" preview”Submitted Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps as a story · 18 points
HN discussionAlso this one from the same author: http://dangrover.com/blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-t...
Comment linking /blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-trends.html
on “WeChat is reinventing ecommerce and America is playing catch-up”Submitted More Chinese Mobile UI Trends as a story · 18 points
HN discussionRelated: a great article series about mobile UI and app trends in China: http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/01/31/more-chinese-mobile-ui-... (from a wechat product manager / Silicon Valley transplant)
Comment linking /blog/2016/01/31/more-chinese-mobile-ui-trends.html
on “WeChat is reinventing ecommerce and America is playing catch-up”Submitted More Chinese Mobile UI Trends as a story · 6 points
HN discussionYou'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....
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html
on “A Natural Language User Interface is just a User Interface”Submitted Chinese Apps Handled Covid-19 as a story · 5 points
HN discussionFrom reading the wikipedia for his company [0] and "Chinese Mobile App UI Trends" [1] a while back, after getting to the part that their app has a web browser, I got the impression that they are replicating chinese apps for a western audience, where every thing you do (chat, browse, buy) happens through one app. I was not surprised to learn that they got 50M from Tencent. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_Messen…
Comment linking /blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-trends.html
on “The Canadian who wants to dethrone Facebook”Submitted Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps as a story · 5 points
HN discussionA related blog entry by a WeChat dev. http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps....
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html
on “Life in the People’s Republic of WeChat”Submitted Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI 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....
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html
on “I was an undercover bot for 2 months”Submitted Chinese Mobile App UI Trends (2014) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
