Yeah. I live in South Korea, which is dominated by a local instant messenging platform, KakaoTalk. Anyone who cares to be social is on KakaoTalk. Text, photo, video, files, appointments, notifications, polls, payments, booking a hairdresser ... the list of things that are done through Kakao is long. A phone without a KakaoTalk client is useless.

I guess his response would be that the web-based approach changes the pitch from "make a version of KakaoTalk for our mobile OS" to "make a web version of KakaoTalk, which also runs on our mobile OS" along with "and you don't even need to talk to us for deployment".