I spent 7 years in the core team building the biggest app in Vietnam (70M+ users). I researched the Chinese app ecosystem heavily, especially WeChat. From what I've seen, most of the mess comes from business decisions, not from a lack of design skills or a different cultural taste. There are 2 different things here: the artistic side of the design, and the complexity of the information. The latter overwhelms the former. In China, and partly in Vietnam, companies want to build super apps. A super app is one application people use for every single purpose in their everyday life: messaging, payments, ticket booking, short videos, and hundreds more. When you have that ambition and try to fit in that many features, the classic UX rules get traded off, and many of them simply can't be applied. As a result, if you're used to the simplicity of Western design and how much it cares about information architecture, Chinese apps look like chaos. And they are indeed chaotic. No cultural explanation can change that. People do find it hard to find anything outside of what they usually use. But in my humble opinion, these are deliberate decisions, not poor design skills. When building a super app, you must optimize for cross-selling. When users use one service, you must get them to use more related (or even unrelated) services. What's the most basic design approach to achieve that? Yes: put everything on the screen, next to each other, near the one users just picked. Do it intensively and you create a mess. But that mess perfectly fulfills the original objective. Another thing that makes it harder: mini apps. Super apps open their platform to thousands of third parties, from big brands to small shops. Their interfaces are built by those partners, not by the super app's designers. There are design guidelines, but enforcing them is very challenging. Strict review slows down partners, while the platform wants the ecosystem to grow fast. And users don't see the boundary. To them, it's one app. So every low-quality mini app makes the whole super app look rough. That's why at many points, the design looks odd and low quality. So the nature of the ecosystem creates a different level of information architecture, which leads to a chaotic design on purpose. When you see that mess, it's very hard for you, who are familiar with and inspired by Western design, to call it good design. Even Chinese people see it as a mess. A mess is a mess, regardless of culture. At this point, I want to emphasize again that this is not a skill issue of Chinese designers. They have good designers, a lot of them. I've known many great designers from Tencent, the maker of WeChat. When we spot basic design issues like bad padding or misaligned elements, they are just... design bugs. Just like design bugs in Western products. No cultural difference turns bad padding into good design in China. Then let's talk about the artistic side of design. It's difficult, almost impossible, to make that mess beautiful in the common sense. Interestingly, they approach it in a different way: by bringing more cultural elements into the design. For example, most Western apps look the same throughout the year. But in Chinese, and some Vietnamese, apps, you'll see something special for every traditional event. The colors, the animations, the decorations... everything changes to celebrate the occasion. Think Google Doodles, but at a much larger scale. This is how they solve the artistic side of design from an emotional perspective. So culture does show up in these apps, just not as an excuse for the mess. There are many other examples of how they adapt their design. This is an interesting topic. I first touched on it in 2013. 13 years later, people are still questioning it and trying to explain it. Seeing it come up again today made my weekend.