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Thanks for the interesting observations. No surprises. In my experience, wechat is a spam monster - too many useless notifications and missing useful features

Thanks for the interesting observations. No surprises. In my experience, wechat is a spam monster - too many useless notifications and missing useful features like easy OTT voice calls and read receipts. I find iMessage and whatsapp (I use both hourly) vastly superior. How old is your uber/didi experience? I find both now to be mostly useless to non-chinese. I tried to get an uber to the airport in Beijing last week and would you believe there is no POI in english for "airport". Search comes up empty. This seems recent, it wasn't an issue last year when I was travelling there frequently. I agree, if you do get a valid destination the uberx drivers have enough english to find you and get you where you are going. People's uber on the other hand... its good for entertainment...

tluyben2 10y ago
This was a few weeks ago. It is worse than last year but I use a lot of mapping apps to figure out which characters to use. If that does not help me I usually just ask someone on the street.
deleted 10y ago
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seanmcdirmid 10y ago
Uber/didi are still technically illegal for China airport pickup, and operate in a very legal grey zone, it makes sense that the software would lack that POI artificially. There are ways around it, but local knowledge, at least some Chinese skills, is needed to get around it. The taxi queue at BJS is quite reasonable most of the time, so I don't bother with didi. But this is why doing biz can be hard in China, so many business models operate in grey zones while the government lets them go on while swinging a huge axe over their head. As another example, did you know electric tricycles are illegal throughout the entire country? And China's whole new goods delivery businesses are built around these....