Zawinski’s Law — a modern take

2 min readAug 9, 2017

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

Legendary coder Jamie Zawinski called this the Law of Software Development.

I recently realized that this law applies more than ever. Instead of email, it’s all about chat and voice calls these days.

Not only are app sizes growing like a weed, these companies simply can’t help themselves. If the competition offers real-time chat, they must too.

So every program attempts to expand until it embeds WhatsApp-like functionality. I think Zawinski’s law is still very much alive.

Below are some examples:

SnapChat

And those are just the more famous apps. How do we feel about this trend?