[nomay]

The Android Wechat app came bundled with a years-old fork of webview, coz the Android scene is a total mess, various vendors not only never update their system apps, but actually substitute it with their custom versions, this made it unusable and a “Chinese Webview” necessary, so wechat got one, all of Tencent's services use it plus plenty of third party apps, since almost every Android 5+ phone has the latest WeChat and their WebView fork.

So this situation almost made their platform mentality an inevitabily, now they only need to define a set of principles for then to be a mobile OS.

I'd say their applet thing can do 99% of the things a standalone app could, but the development speed , reach and functionality you can get is unmatched, best of all, it's the one true unified cross platform OS: on Android, iOS and Windows, but Chinese market only.

So it's not a super app, it's a mobile OS.

[btbuildem]

That's how the article qualified it at the end, right? An "Operating System Super App"