This trend seems to be a western trend. Here is somewhere where I think we could learn from the apps in Japan and especially China.
I frequently feel for any app that I use frequently, i would prefer for it to have many options that I could use to customize its behavior. For instance, Uber
As someone who reads Japanese passably well and uses a handful of Japanese apps and websites, I don't actually agree with this. Japanese apps certainly look more crowded than western ones, but it's mostly with irrelevant garbage, I don't think the density of useful info is actually all that much higher.
> In Chinese apps, I can post photos, message my friends, order food, call an uber, pay transactions, all from the same app
I don't see how this statement says anything about UI information density.
This is just a super app with monopoly over the market. Last I checked (and it's been a while if I'm being honest) WeChat just looked like a custom launcher for other views/apps that all happen to be hosted and controlled by the one company. That's like saying "Android is super dense. I can post photos, message my friends, order food, call an uber, pay transactions, all from the same device"
Pretty sure Facebook or Google would love to be that super app for US/Europe/rest of the world. However, you'd probably shout "monopoly, lock-in, anti-trust, market manipulation" if any single vendor actually tried and succeeded in that. For good reasons too.
> for any app that I use frequently, i would prefer for it to have many options that I could use to customize its behavior. For instance, Uber
The problem is that the era of zero interest rates and (mostly unprofitable) advertising-based business models means the tech industry shifted from making tools to benefit the user to "tools" that waste the user's time. Company targets are often measured in "engagement" such as screen time, DAU/MAU or pointless metrics about how many times some button was clicked.
The zero interest rate era is mostly behind us, but the mentality remains and company targets are still often based on that, so employees are not incentivized to make products more efficient for the user since doing so will reduce the DAU/MAU or whatever metric they're judged on.
Please don’t. Most mobile apps made by Chinese developers, esp. big techs, do employ grid, paged layouts everywhere as though multiple iOS home screens were squeezed into the app. However, most grids in such layouts are useless, distracting, and even malicious from a UX perspective, their mere reason to exist being to steer users into endless rabbit holes of the devs’ multiple lines of businesses for KPI purposes, and thus subject to constant and arbitrary changes. As such, you can find an icon for personal financing in a cloud storage app, or find an icon for groceries in a ride hailing app, only to be replaced with icons for online dating and hotel booking and something something a week later. This density of user-adversarial features is to be avoid by all means.
I frequently feel for any app that I use frequently, i would prefer for it to have many options that I could use to customize its behavior. For instance, Uber