I'm biased working on the thing, but speaking purely a user, I feel WeChat gives us a peek of the phone OS we'll see in 3 years.<p>The recent "messaging apps will eat everything" spin is burying the lede. What's happening, broadly, is that in some places (esp. Asia), OS/phone vendors are losing in the early stages of a war between platform (iOS, Android) and meta-platform (things like WeChat, LINE, FB).<p>Yes, its central function is nominally an SMS replacement, but as a meta-platform it plasters over a bunch of gaps in the OS level. The central UI is a common, semi-hierarchical stream for notifications/news/messages with a consistent set of controls for deprioritizing/blocking things. Then you have services like payment, authentication, and social graph. A lightweight Instapaper/Evernote shared by all my apps. Handling for things like QR codes which western-designed OSes don't do on a system level. Universal search for chat and non-chat content alike. A health/activity data feature for the various Bluetooth gizmos my friends and I use. Then, on top of that, you have tons of light-weight third-party services/apps which, while the experience can shoddier than a native app, for 50% of apps is far more convenient than actually downloading and updating so many 100MB+ apps on my phone and spotting their various red badges in a sea of icons/groups.<p>In effect, it's a nascent vision of an OS oriented around a thread-based UI paradigm instead of an app-based UI paradigm. Some day, I'm certain some kind of sensible central "inbox" will replace my home/lock screen (as well as the push notification tray).