Building for smartphones only is a decision about who you are willing to leave out.
USSD runs on every handset, needs no data bundle, no app store and no installation. For services that must reach farmers, market traders, rural members or anyone on a feature phone, it remains the widest available channel.
The design constraints are real: short menus, no images, and a session that times out. But those constraints produce disciplined products. If a flow cannot be expressed in a few numbered options, it is usually too complicated for the web version too.
The practical approach is to treat USSD as a first-class front end over the same API your web and mobile apps use, rather than as a separate system. One set of business rules, several ways in.
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