I live in China, and resisted using wechat for a year or so, until it became clear that I was essentially removing myself from the majority of China's online world. I'm still highly annoyed when I get seven minutes' worth of 30-second voice clips from someone, or when people insist on using it as a replacement for email (essentially, using it as a replacement for all internet-based communication, period), but it's impossible to ignore.<p>And I'll admit, finding the wallet thing was a bit of an "a ha" moment for me.<p>And lastly, it became obvious that the <i>only</i> way to promote my company and its business to a Chinese audience was to run an official wechat account for it.<p>So there we are. I just got a new phone, and wechat was the first thing I installed.
It sounds like a world where AOL won and we all accessed the internet through keywords and paid everything through AOL, or very similar to France's old Minitel, except for mobile.<p>Having everything in one app is interesting if only because it offers some powerful integration opportunities, but otherwise this sounds like a proto-Internet for a developing economy.<p>$5 says they evolve past this in the next 3-5 years and their app ecosystem looks a lot more like ours.
I think a great deal is being attributed to "leapfrogging" which should instead be attributed to idiosyncrasies in the Chinese market. Like that it's big, and that a great deal of software is bundled.<p>For starters, surely there are other places around the world with nation-dominating highly-integrated platform apps. I mean, they name LINE and KakaoTalk. Is their point that China is 3x bigger than Japan and 10x bigger than Korea? Those factors are certainly accurate with respect to their national PPP (3.7x and 9.9x), and explains the data they observe really well. But Japan didn't have a leapfrogging experience, as they claim. Korea is a bit more complicated, but nonetheless, not cut-and-dried.<p>Why WeChat in particular? The other apps compared—LINE and KakaoTalk—arguably became dominant in their countries the same way WeChat did: bundling. It just comes with your phone. By that logic, do we label the Apple App Store, bundled with every iPhone, a "service" that takes a 30% cut of many of the transactions that occur there? Again, the App Store absolutely fulfills all the roles described in the article, notwithstanding their particular points about UI.<p>A16Z just isn't getting rich off Apple, so they're not going around hyping up an arguably the platform to end all platforms. Apple made $4.8 billion in iTunes and software on 1 billion iOS devices total by Q1 2015. It's not WeChat's estimated "$7 ARPU", but honestly, I bet Apple's is actually higher.
The beauty of WeChat is not it has tons of features, it's the tons of features are well hidden. As another user said, it's very natural to have used WeChat for quite some time and doesn't know all these existed. People always say it's not just a chat app, but if you use it just for chat then it's a pretty good one with good voice and video chat quality, supports group chat well and has a clean UI. All the other features are opt-in, hidden in several level of menus. There are no flashy confusing buttons, no daily reminder asking you to try some new feature, no distraction. For me and my friends who has long abandoned the bloated and flashy QQ for simple gtalk (before google got banned), WeChat is a breath of fresh air.
I am in China right this instant and (like everyone) I have wechat on my phone. Perhaps the services mentioned don't have much use/appeal to expats, but I have never heard of any of the stuff mentioned in this article. Wechat to me is just a texting app because data is cheaper than texts (thanks China Mobile).<p>At first I couldn't even find any of the features mentioned. some of the stuff (taxi's, planes) are hidden in some submenu called "bank cards" which I originally thought was for unlocking emoji and stuff. Perhaps I need to run an update, but I can't even find a "sub app store" of 3rd party verified accounts.
The post fails to mention that WeChat is protected from competition against other major global apps. If Google, Facebook, et al, were allowed to operate freely in China, WeChat would get picked apart.<p>Yes, there are a lot of cool things about WeChat and certain features that it arguably does better than its foreign counterparts, but it is still a mess. It is slow, cluttered, bloated, and full of crimes against design. The lack of competitive pressure really shows.<p>I imagine that if and when some real competition shows up, WeChat will evolve into a full-blown mobile OS.
I like how "official account" are lightweight apps. They are like the web with push notifications, online identity, and payment integrated into the web browser. The usual web can fulfil the features of official accounts in theory, but it's awkward.
1. push notification -> email
2. online identity -> login to fb, twitter, github, or website specific login
3. payment -> authorize paypal, bitcoin, amazon, bank<p>Whenever u want to do something on the web (e.g. buy a ticket), u have to figure out how to login (worse if you have to create a new account), how to make payment, and check your emails for confirmations and updates. That's enough friction to make a user hunt for alternatives. On top of that, the website make not work well on your mobile phone.
I've traveled to China about 2-3 times each year for the last few years. I strongly recommend that people who travel to China install WeChat. Not only is it guaranteed to work in China, but it gives you instant street cred when you're there.<p>It's very, very common for people to say to me, "Wow, you have WeChat? You are so Chinese!" (I don't look Chinese at all, and my Mandarin is still at an elementary level, so this is clearly a cultural compliment!) It's the easiest, fastest, and cheapest thing you can do to make a connection with any hosts, friends, or business colleagues you meet there.<p>WeChat does indeed have tons of features. I've used it for personal and group communication, but also for video chats (when Skype went crazy on me), and it was solid. My Chinese teacher and I use it to exchange messages and photos, either when I'm visiting China or when we're outside of class time. I'm on a few groups, and it's a surprisingly clean and easy-to-use program for group chat.<p>I also use WhatsApp, and while that has a much nicer interface, it's not obvious to me that it's superior to WeChat.
Isn't it just users with QQ numbers pick a slim version (which is more adapted to mobile use cases) of QQ on mobile devices? QQ number is something almost everyone on internet owns back in early 2000s in China. The number became the utility. As long as one has internet connection, one does not need a phone number to get connected.<p>I don't like WeChat. But that's what you have to use since that's where everyone you know are. MSN once had the chance to complete with QQ, but it gave up. And everybody had no better choice but picked up their old QQ number.<p>From another perspective, it's also accompanied with the rise of local business, which shifted the attitude towards local society recognition.<p>Money makes then ugly now pretty.
It seems like the opportunity here for Firefox OS and Android in the future is to have an API layer that's even simpler and allow for apps that are lighter weight. As I read the article I thought, hey wouldn't it be nice if my apartment building let me reserve the tennis court or report issues with an app? But then I thought...it would take them 3 months to put together something that just barely works and then another 9 months to make something that works well and it'll probably still have a shitty user interface.
WeChat is so much better than other messaging platforms that I'm willing to get on it in spite of privacy concerns. I have never noticed an ad and I'm in complete control over what messages I receive. It just feels so much better than Facebook or Twitter where it's obvious that my data is the product. I have no idea what kind of things WeChat does with its massive amounts of data, but at least they have legitimate revenue streams that don't involve shoving unwanted content in front of me.