[huhweirdyhat]

When you lease an apartment, do you get the details via WhatsApp/WeChat/TodaysChatApp or email? How about receipts, bank statements, anything where deliverability actually matters?

Email is infrastructure; people invest in it. If the only people investing in these chat apps are themselves people, these apps could be ghost towns in years.

In some sense you're right; in another sense, it still seems like email is likely to outlive walled gardens because there's no long-term reason to use them.

In particular, unless there's a decent way to ensure that nobody can take my received messages away from me, i'm unlikely to adopt it for anything but chatting with friends.

[pinwale]

In China, you will probably do all of the above in WeChat rather than email. Whenever I need to conduct business with someone in China, it's always over WeChat rather than email.

One of the Chinese court systems actually sends notifications through their WeChat account. I believe there are even pilot programs where you can initiate court cases through WeChat as well.

[ryandrake]

As a non-Chinese, this seems... problematic to say the least. What if you don't have WeChat, or prefer not to use it? Are there standards-based alternatives offered? Off-line alternatives, maybe?