But surely there is a point at which the feature bloat becomes too great? the app becomes so feature-dense that users are turned off by the complexity, and the trickle of adventurous users doesn't satisfy the costs of development and maintenance of a new feature. I've heard a lot of stories about chat-apps with built-in payment functionality. I've heard of few successes.
I would like to think that WeChat is successful in the Chinese marketplace because that marketplace isn't actually very competitive. The government puts their thumb on the scale in favor of simplifying their mechanisms of control.
There is a phrase associated with unix: "Make each program do one thing well". Mobile operating systems lack the inter-process communication needed to make an ecosystem of simple, extensible programs.
I would like to think that WeChat is successful in the Chinese marketplace because that marketplace isn't actually very competitive. The government puts their thumb on the scale in favor of simplifying their mechanisms of control.
There is a phrase associated with unix: "Make each program do one thing well". Mobile operating systems lack the inter-process communication needed to make an ecosystem of simple, extensible programs.