Thanks for the thoughts Ruan.

• Agree, messaging is the first thing people would download on their phones. But that is because they want to talk to their friends and family over it, not to talk to businesses.
• The first thing that comes to my mind if I have to avail any service is to google about it. Going to a messaging app is not my first reflex and I believe that is true for a lot of users out there.
• I am not really sure if the UI of messaging apps makes a lot of difference(apart from Snapchat which I could personally never make sense of). There is almost zero learning curve with all of them. And I believe that’s the beauty of chat interface — there is nothing to learn.
• I am not saying the bots over messaging platforms are bad and the fact that one shouldn’t make them. What I mean is there is an existing problem over mobile web and bots can fix it. Messaging apps open a new channel for businesses and it would take some time for messaging apps to be the default channel for business-user interaction.

Just realised that quite a lot has changed since I wrote this post and so have my thoughts around the space :)