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Comment by cheeyoonlee | Hacker News Reader

If he does, they really need to work on the UI/UX side of things because FB and Messenger already feel like bloatware and they're difficult to navigate. WeChat on the other hand, along with KakaoTalk but WeChat especially, does it very well without feeling heavy and annoying to use.

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Could you be more specific about what's worse on Messenger than WeChat?

Facebook app, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram all feel a bit repetitive in features. Like they're competing against each other in many ways. WeChat as a single mega app feels very unified. If Mark builds the next WeChat for the West, I'm curious to know how he will unify those apps.

Just fyi, unifying Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram is something they mentioned a while back [0], and is something that they're moving foward with now [1]. Although it's looking like they're just going to get the underlying architecture the same so you can message people across apps and less that there is going to be 1 app for everything.

[0] https://www.slashgear.com/whatsapp-instagram-facebook-messen...

[1] https://www.slashgear.com/facebook-messenger-f8-2019-desktop...

It's so they can track you better across all their platforms

FYI, you can also download Messenger Lite. It's less seamless than messenger but it's much lighter weight.

I just checked and it's still not available in the US on iOS

None of those app are difficult to navigate...

Remember when Facebook and Messenger were once a single app? One of the main reasons they separated was to simplify user experience, aside from allowing sms login without a Facebook account, and I can't imagine the two together again at their current state. The reason why WeChat works so well is it's always been chat forward. Their 'moments' works moreso like a lite Twitter feed than Facebook's mess of a newsfeed. And all the misc third party integrations and apps are neatly organized and don't get in the way of chat and moments. Nothing about the interface or experience feels spammy or unnecessary and I never have to think much to get to what I want. At least that's just how I felt heavily using all those apps. There's something about all-in-one/mega apps that Asia does really well.

Instagram is good.

I actually think Instagram is a better candidate to become the next WeChat

How is Messenger Bloated?

Its not like facebook applications haven't had insane amounts of duplicated resources and crazy amounts of gigantic libraries/frameworks: https://blog.timac.org/2017/0410-analysis-of-the-facebook-ap...

Not sure if its relevant for messenger or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if messenger was overly huge for the task its performing.

It is a piece of bloated app that adds all your FB friends to your messenger friend list automatically and constantly spams you to contact them on anniversaries etc. I deleted it the same day I downloaded it.

that's weird, i never get prompted to contact anyone except for the default thread that opens when you have a new friend, which admittedly i don't like

sometimes on HN I get the feeling that anything more than a command line application written in Rust or in C may be called bloated

C isn't hipster enough for HN.

I wrote a custom ARM assembler that generate prolog that uses genetic programming techniques to optimize the interface. I've found the best interface to be my set of 8 multi-colored LEDs driven by a custom build arduino system that talks serial. Unfortunately I have to use a usb-serial adapter these days, and then a usb-c-to-usb-a adapter. My dongles have dongles.

can't tell if you're serious, the beginning sounds crazy but the end is a mundane practical issue

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