Honestly, there’s still some core features of the Nintendo Switch that are more unclear now than they were 3 weeks ago. There’s nothing more unclear than how Nintendo is going to handle online/matchmaking/voice chat.
Reggie revealed that all matchmaking and voice chat would be done through a smartphone app which seemed odd. It was then revealed through Street Fighter’s online mode that you could in-fact matchmake in-game.
Now, an official Nintendo Switch diagram has detailed that the headphone jack will be compatible with headphones, microphones and tablets”
The specific line says: “For connecting commercially available headphones, microphones and headsets”
Now, this could just mean that they are compatible but the system won’t have the functionality built in to voice chat, but it seems like an incredibly odd thing to note if you’ll need to plug a microphone/headset into your smartphone to voice chat.
Hopefully Nintendo clear this up soon.
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I'm still banking on an original theory of mine that what Nintendo meant was purely the software application will be handled on the phone, the chat audio would just be wirelessly streamed to the Switch game and mixed with the game audio.
In any case I imagine a main reason Nintendo are using a phone app at all is to save Switch processing power (by running social apps on a seperate device) and/or to create one unified chat service to be used by all players, as opposed to every individual game being programmed with chat functions