I had a look at the Telegram messenger’s bot API: https://core.telegram.org/bots/ . It gave me the idea that a telegram bot is the perfect way to control an IoT device. I may soon attempt this with a particle photon. It would work very nicely with a backend making calls into the particle cloud. The reason i’m thinking about this, is that it may be simpler to set up a bot than to create a new web app.
Is there a question, or is just just a general announcement on what you’re planning on doing? I’ve used the API before and it seemed to work nicely, so this is definitely doable 
Just a general discussion. I’m most likely going to use this for my project (https://sleeptrack.io/). I like the idea of not having to go through a complicated web development build.
You’d then have to ‘force’ users to use a chat program made by the Russian equivalent of Facebook to use their application. Not sure how paranoid everybody is after the whole Snowden thingy, but I can imagine people not appreciating being forced to use that. It’s nice for personal project, but I don’t think I’d use it in a product. That’s just my two cents though 
If you’re selling a commercial products, then I think your customers will demand having a dedicated app, no doubt about it. But for a hobby project, it wouldn’t matter I think.