To be fair, this is part of the problem ^

In fact people who like stories and camera effects likely way outnumber the people that don't.

Summarizing it as a chat app is probably the first miscommunication here.

The number of people that use camera effects as anything other than a gimmick is even smaller.

Maybe a different age group?

I think that most of people of HN have friend groups which are wildly unrepresentative of world population at large. We're talking not even an average US or European citizen here - we're talking 1+ billion. People from developing countries who very often access internet only from a smartphone (they don't own a computer) and who almost don't visit plain http websites outside of the few social apps.

It's a completely different world out there.

Some of the problems outlined, like having 40 different views of contacts, with unique code, seem like fairly clear organizational problems.

I wonder if they could make apps more modular, and only load the binaries for e.g. payments on demand. I know Apple offers a system that does that for content chunks (e.g. levels and assets in games), and in a web-based application (e.g. react native) they could use bundling to remove it from the initial download.