Note that WeChat has a Douyin-competing product, "Channels."

Oh, sure; so does Facebook. Douyin/TikTok is clearly the market leader in both its incarnations, tho.

Also Taobao/Tmall and Alipay is completely separate.

WeChat certainly filled in a lot of holes in iOS such as QR code scanning (which didn’t get native support until a few years ago) so it provided a sort of OS within the phone OS to get a utility knife of features being used in China that Apple neglected. But I wouldn’t say they have complete domination of all markets.

Keep in mind QR codes were a thing in China since the early 2010s, whereas the US didn’t start adopting QR codes until the later half of the decade when Apple finally made QR scanning part of the OS… because Apple was hell bent on making BLE beacons a thing.

So our “everything app” was iOS and Apple literally held us back by 5-8 years regarding QR code adoption just because of some corporate agenda…

I think the “social media everything app/superapp” characterization is slightly off the mark: A lot of those are private chat apps. It’s called WeChat, you know, not WePostPublic.

Sure but that's just more of an argument that an "everything app" hasn't succeeded even in China.

Yeah, I’m thinking it’s more like “extreme scope creeps in private real-time text console sometimes works”.

Like there had been the famous PizzaTool in SVR4, countless hacks over modern history with IRC, server status reports with pagers, prepaid topups over SMS, or food deliveries and micropayments with WeChat, on and on. The common denominator of those isn’t China or Asia. Sorry I didn’t post it as a top level comment, maybe I should have.