There's some kind of law in operation that states that all chat and telephony apps must evolve toward increased suckitude. I've lost count of how many good chat

There's some kind of law in operation that states that all chat and telephony apps must evolve toward increased suckitude. I've lost count of how many good chat/voice/video apps started decent but then over time accumulated bloat, experienced degraded service (often due to bloat or a shift away from p2p), and got encrusted with gimmicks and marketing junk to the point that they became unusable. I suspect it's because simple chat, voice, and video is a relatively bounded and commodity feature set. Everything must justify its existence, so there's always a drive to add more features and bloat to attempt to differentiate. Over time that swamps the original design. This is a problem for all software but it seems particularly bad in the chat/telephony domain. I also think the move away from p2p driven by lightweight mobile devices (and I suspect also by governments) degrades service. Non-p2p links are by definition higher latency and lower bandwidth as they're passing through additional indirect relay devices.