TENCENT Holdings built a hugely successful messaging platform with its WeChat app. Now an experimental new service may give it even greater sway over how the biggest online population uses the internet.With 806 million-monthly active accounts, nearly all in China, WeChat is the application that Chinese spend most of their smartphone time on. Messaging aside, people use WeChat to hail cabs, make payments, book hotels or buy movie tickets.The new feature, which WeChat said this month it was testing, provides development tools for businesses to build subapps within WeChat that can make all those services simpler to use while staying in WeChat.This could turn WeChat’s app into a sort of operating system within an operating system, a one-stop app that users would rarely have to leave to use other mobile apps.Tencent hasn’t said when it will fully roll out the feature, called Xiaochengxu, or "little program," but it already is generating intense buzz. In part, that’s because of concern th...
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