[illiarian]

> I’d put money on others launching similar things.

WeChat has had this for years (and other messengers in South Wast Asia).

I have no idea why in-chat apps were never successfully implemented in the "West". There were minimal attempts by bot Apple and Facebook to add apps to their chats, but at best it's "let's add stickers"

[vachina]

WeChat is garbage. The only reason it gained prominence is because (better) alternatives are banned or blocked, causing spillover network effect to Chinese outside of China.

[meowtimemania]

Why do you say it’s garbage?

[kmarc]

I hope we get an answer to this.

When I had to use it on my first visit to China, I couldn't possibly believe this is an app that people are actually using day to day. Slow, sluggish, graphical artifacts, NPEs.

Then I learned that the "Western" version is totally different, so I believe the real WeChat is a usable product and in par with whatsapp and telegram

[ospider]

Because it's a walled garden. Imagine a Facebook that is strictly real name only, without a web version, and consumes ~50GiB on device typically.

[akudha]

50 gigs!!!! Are you sure? That is massive. Did you mean to say 5 gigs?

[Barrin92]

because Asia leap-frogged over old internet protocols in favor of platforms, whereas a lot of Western systems are tied into email, websites and the crawlable/open web. Same reason SMS is still popular in the US compared to ip-based chatting everywhere else.

[echelon]

Leap-frogged has the connotation of "progress".

Walled gardens and controlled ecosystems are horrible and concentrate power in the gatekeepers.

I hope the experience is kludgy and user unfriendly to the point that startups not contained in the straightjackets of other systems continue to win out.

[afiori]

On the other hand the only ecosystem where SMS work decently is the Apple walled garden that IIUC is not run on actuall SMS technology.