Apple’s favourite newspaper, The New York Times, which long ago shredded any attempt at journalist integrity by hawking Apple gear and acting as its defacto press office, has dared to suggest that the outfit has been over egging the pudding on its more recent offerings.

Last year Apple released a few gimmicks such as the ability to order food, scribble doodles and send funny images known as stickers in chats on its Messages app.

However, the Times  has found that most of the features - including expansion of Messages - are too complicated for many users to figure out. The whole philosophy of Apple from the beginning was to offer users less but make them pay more money for it. Users hardly use most functions anyway and this enabled it to get to the sort of apps they wanted.

Apple wanted to make Messages, one of the most popular apps on the iPhone, into an all-purpose tool like China's WeChat. While that might work in China, it is because users are generally cleverer than Apple users in the US who found the process of finding and installing other apps in Messages was taxing their tiny brains.

Most users have no idea they can even do it, developers and analysts say. Those who were using the application frequently found that it was forcing them to forget other important data, like their own names.