I'd argue this is a much older insight. It's not that it's frictionless, it's that it's opinionated.
All of the products mentioned ADD friction for the wrong customer base. Cursor is FORCING you to use AI when in VS Code it is optional.
Apple realized this a long time ago.
They create extremely opinionated products and remove features so that their products resonate with a certain group of people. They add tons of friction for the wrong customer which reduces friction to almost 0 for the right one e.g. one app store, one size home screen icon, not a lot of advanced settings, etc.
The key is just having good enough taste so that your opinion resonates and choosing a big enough market to where that opinion matters.
ggm · 14h ago
Except no extensions on android, and useful adjunct plugins to jump paywalls or enable bitwarden sensibly are subsumed to "when chrome says we can"
In some ways, brave is chilling the 3rd party market.
kingraphaii · 13h ago
Totally fair.
And I think the tension lies in that baking in value often means limiting choice.
You win on simplicity but sacrifice modularity.
This is the tradeoff Brave makes here.
For the average user, that’s a win.
For the power user? Sometimes it sucks. Now, is the average internet surfer a power user?
Brave gives you a sealed box of "it just works", but that also means you can’t always reach under the hood.
So yeah, you can’t install your own bitwarden plugin on Android Brave (for now). Jumping paywalls may not be part of their business model.
This doesn’t contradict the "frictionless wins" principle, but rather reinforces it:
Brave optimizes for default outcomes, not universal flexibility. Cursor does the same. So does Apple. So does Linear.
And like with Apple:
Hackers will jailbreak. Some will use something else. But the majority will take what works by default and keep moving.
So if you’re designing tools, this is the real takeaway:
You can’t frictionlessly serve everybody and you have to pick who you’re frictionless for.
All of the products mentioned ADD friction for the wrong customer base. Cursor is FORCING you to use AI when in VS Code it is optional.
Apple realized this a long time ago.
They create extremely opinionated products and remove features so that their products resonate with a certain group of people. They add tons of friction for the wrong customer which reduces friction to almost 0 for the right one e.g. one app store, one size home screen icon, not a lot of advanced settings, etc.
The key is just having good enough taste so that your opinion resonates and choosing a big enough market to where that opinion matters.
In some ways, brave is chilling the 3rd party market.
And I think the tension lies in that baking in value often means limiting choice. You win on simplicity but sacrifice modularity.
This is the tradeoff Brave makes here.
For the average user, that’s a win. For the power user? Sometimes it sucks. Now, is the average internet surfer a power user?
Brave gives you a sealed box of "it just works", but that also means you can’t always reach under the hood.
So yeah, you can’t install your own bitwarden plugin on Android Brave (for now). Jumping paywalls may not be part of their business model.
This doesn’t contradict the "frictionless wins" principle, but rather reinforces it:
Brave optimizes for default outcomes, not universal flexibility. Cursor does the same. So does Apple. So does Linear.
And like with Apple: Hackers will jailbreak. Some will use something else. But the majority will take what works by default and keep moving.
So if you’re designing tools, this is the real takeaway:
You can’t frictionlessly serve everybody and you have to pick who you’re frictionless for.