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Comment by 77ko | Hacker News Reader

Not quite:

- Facebook Messenger combines all the functionality of Allo and Duo. - Whatsapp already has voice calling and is adding video soon (so I read on the internet) - iMessage and Facetime integrate in IOS much better than Google Duo does. In IOS, you go to a contact and press facetime. On Android, you go to a contact... then go back out to Duo and call them.

WeChat, of course, does everything that all these apps will ever do - as of many years ago.

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I feel like ICQ 98 was the pinnacle of chat applications. Floating contacts and email style messages... brilliance.

> email style messages

Care to elaborate? I'm having trouble picturing what you mean. Long form with styling?

The "find random chat partner" feature was so addictive!

Strongly agree. It's still unsurpassed. And it worked well on systems with 64mb of RAM (maybe even less) without stomping all over the rest of the programs you were running. Seems like no-one can even "Hello World" a desktop app these days without a 100mb download and requiring several hundred MB of memory all to itself.

I was visiting China recently and started using WeChat... it really is far ahead of other messaging apps, the amount of integration with other services is staggering (many shops offer payment through the app, QR codes to link to WeChat are commonplace, even my hotel advertised its wifi settings through WeChat!)

I wonder if WeChat will try to push the service more outside of China?

you can call/message a person from contact page directly, I have done that with whatsapp

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