Back in 2016 conventional wisdom had it that messaging platforms and chatbots were going to disrupt mobile apps, based on what was happening in China with WeChat, where people almost never leave the app, and do their e-commerce and almost everything else within the app environment. And Chris Messina predicted, “you and I will be talking to brands and companies over Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and elsewhere before year’s end, and will find it normal.”Less than 2 years on, this has turned out to be a Silicon Valley mirage.

There were legitimate reasons to get excited back then:

• Messaging is huge. Business Insider wrote, “Messaging apps are bigger than social networks,” noting that chat had surpassed social networking in monthly active users. This makes intuitive sense: We are social creatures, and so much of our lives involve conversation
• People don’t download apps. As of June 2017, 51% of US smartphone users downloaded zero apps per month;
• Apps are hard to build. A lot of work goes into designing and building even a simple app, be it native or web. With a bot, a lot of that complexity disappears — from user interaction to login to network traffic.
• Messaging platforms are huge abroad. Merchants conduct business over SMS in emerging markets. In China, WeChat is a dominant platform for all sorts of products. Why not in the rest of the world, too?
• Relationships matter. Every business wants a real relationship with its customers, and conversation is fundamental to relationships. That’s especially true for brand-driven businesses, but extends to others as well.

In hindsight, there were 2 misconceptions:

WeChat is a messaging platform

WeChat is a messaging app with a platform, and is not fundamentally a messaging platform. The key point is that apps can actually run inside WeChat. The key wins for WeChat largely came from streamlining away app installation, login, payment, and notifications – optimisations that having nothing to do with the conversational metaphor in its UI. In other words, WeChat addressed many of the opportunities listed above, but did so without restricting itself to the messaging paradigm.

People prefer using the messaging UI

 The logic was that people spend so much time messaging, that they therefore must prefer this as a mode of communication. This is where chatbots and the idea of “conversational commerce” came in – bi-directional, asynchronous messaging with a business, brand or service.

It turns out that people are not so happy to text their fingers off. Clearly WeChat’s success relied, in part, on recognizing that messaging platforms needn’t restrict themselves purely to messaging UI. The evolution of the GUI (Graphic User Interface) in the early 1980s was a huge step in UI evolution (replacing some typing with clicking, dragging and dropping) compared with text-based interfaces, so did we really think that people would want to go back there, with messaging?

Therefore messaging platforms are evolving, and have added GUI features: Slack’s popup dialogs, Microsoft’s rich_cards, Facebook’s structured templates and web-view overlay. Yet the overall, chat-centric narrative hasn’t changed.

Also, truly intelligent chatbots are not so easy to build, that can actually converse. There has been much progress with NLP (natural language processing), but it still has a long way to go. Conversations aren’t linear. Multiple topics weave around each other. Discussions restart abruptly, or take unexpected left turns. That fluidity is tough to follow algorithmically, and most approaches are brittle.

So where are things going, then?

Conversational commerce will increase, whether human and/or chatbot powered. But any way you slice it, customer relationships matter. You would almost certainly have interacted with Intercom as a customer-service chat widget in the lower right corner of websites. By embedding this widget, developers can use Intercom to manage their customer service and even get some analytics. NLP and AI will continue to improve. Developers and platforms will continue to experiment with different flavors of conversational experience.

Increasingly, products will introduce a messaging component – what are Google Docs comments if not a chat thread? That trend will provide a fertile ground for innovation and opportunities for new companies.

Messaging isn’t going away, just as conversation isn’t gong away. Messaging services will continue to evolve in various forms and in different venues. But messaging platforms will remain niche, and they will not replace mobile apps. But let’s not exclude the possibility that new “WeChat-esque” platforms could still disrupt both our messaging platform and our mobile app paradigms.