[apexalpha]

Having lived in China for 6 months I can say: if you build a mobile OS to just run WeChat embedded. It would work for 90% of what average users (so no, not you here on HN) want from a phone.

Seriously. you can message, voice chat, call, video call, order plane tickets, split bills, order stuff online, buy movie tickets, pay utility bills, share photo's like FB timewall, create publics chatrooms, pay in physical stores and so much more.

That app was ridiculous. Miles ahead of even the biggest dream of any app-central company in the Western world. They built up an entire ecosystem in one app.

Obviously, it drained a lot of battery on Android. But Android itself is miles behind iOS anyway, since there is no Google in China and Android today is pretty much an empty shell without GPlay Services / Framework.

[nebabyte]

> Seriously. you can message, voice chat, call, video call, order plane tickets, split bills, order stuff online, buy movie tickets, pay utility bills, share photo's like FB timewall, create publics chatrooms, pay in physical stores and so much more.

...All of that is handled within the app's runtime? (I would find it incredibly surprising if it did not hand off at least some of those to the phone layer.)

Or if it is - I would be surprised if what you describe doesn't already exist there.

[apexalpha]

Some of the features I encountered where just webpages being loaded inside the app. Like the ticket buying. Possibly just using Android Webview. Except it did perfectly integrate with the (built in) Payment service in the app.

[dilemma]

Some of those things are built on HTML5 and are not part of the app itself. They also let external companies and partners build these apps within WeChat to extend functionality (taxi, ticket booking, ordering food, etc.).

[ganfortran]

Wechat embedded a browser in itself. In that since it is more like Chrome Web Store.

[thewhitetulip]

I think this is one of the important reason (among others) why wechat picked up, there is no Google in China, not even GPlay.