When you lease an apartment, do you get the details via WhatsApp/WeChat/TodaysChatApp or email? How about receipts, bank statements, anything where deliverability actually matters?
Email is infrastructure; people invest in it. If the only people investing in these chat apps are themselves people, these apps could be ghost towns in years.
In some sense you're right; in another sense, it still seems like email is likely to outlive walled gardens because there's no long-term reason to use them.
In particular, unless there's a decent way to ensure that nobody can take my received messages away from me, i'm unlikely to adopt it for anything but chatting with friends.
In China, you will probably do all of the above in WeChat rather than email. Whenever I need to conduct business with someone in China, it's always over WeChat rather than email.
One of the Chinese court systems actually sends notifications through their WeChat account. I believe there are even pilot programs where you can initiate court cases through WeChat as well.
As a non-Chinese, this seems... problematic to say the least. What if you don't have WeChat, or prefer not to use it? Are there standards-based alternatives offered? Off-line alternatives, maybe?
Email is infrastructure; people invest in it. If the only people investing in these chat apps are themselves people, these apps could be ghost towns in years.
In some sense you're right; in another sense, it still seems like email is likely to outlive walled gardens because there's no long-term reason to use them.
In particular, unless there's a decent way to ensure that nobody can take my received messages away from me, i'm unlikely to adopt it for anything but chatting with friends.