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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

This seems kinda disappointing in capability compared with what you see in WeChat. I was expecting you'd be able to build apps that run from inside messenger, instead of toggle back and forth between native apps, possibly using something like ExponentJS/Reactive-Native, but maybe Apple would disapprove.

The WeChat SDK allows apps to run JS from inside WeChat itself. You see this in action in China where you can actually do complex stuff like book a taxi via Didi Dache without necessarily having to switch back and forth between heavyweight apps.

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First browsers became OS's, now you want messenger apps to become OS's?

How many layers of cruft do we need?

If anything, the cruft is shrinking since you simply can't fit as much cruft into mobile.

Let me get this straight.

- The phone OS has a shell, usually written in native code.

- The messenger app runs on top of the shell, usually written on top of some type of VM.

- The messenger app contains a web browser that renders other apps, written in js.

Please, for your own sanity, don't even bother investigating how operating systems actually work.

Aleman360 works for Microsoft on the Windows 10 shell. So I think it's safe to say that Aleman360 knows how operating systems actually work.

I guess I was thinking of cruft differently. All the messaging and bots are reducing UIs back down to CLIs again. Which is pretty much the sparest UI there is. Except perhaps for voice, the other UI gaining traction on mobile. So, yes, the physical size of mobile devices is reducing practically all the cruft.

I'd hardly call it "cruft" - this is the beauty of computer systems and software - abstraction!

And now your messenger app needs a launcher, switcher, notification manager, search, per-app settings pages, etc. And maybe its own process model/scheduler, to prevent rogue apps from slowing down the messenger app. And apps within the messenger app now need to be cross-messenger-platform on top of being cross-webview-platform.

It's almost like people's expectations for software go up over time.

How do you write an app for WeChat? Their documentation at http://dev.wechat.com/ only talks about sharing content with WeChat users.

Have a look at what we're doing with our startup: https://platform.happening.im - it's exactly what you're describing: a (group) messenger that allows third party developers to create their own HTML5-based apps that can have complex functionality and/or interfaces.

The top feature of any software platform is "can reach hundreds of millions of users". Solve that problem first and then maybe you'll be able to entice developers to build on your platform.

Actually, I recall this platform from being quite popular in the Netherlands for a while. It received quite some media attention and a lot of people I know used it. It's not hundreds of millions, but it definitely had some reach!

See https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/impl...

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