>for many years, wechat has been combining new features with its social network, whereas whatsapp wanted to be a pure chatting app and missed many opportunities

>for many years, wechat has been combining new features with its social network, whereas whatsapp wanted to be a pure chatting app and missed many opportunities. Nah, WhatsApp was just crippled by its origins. It was started independently from a major social-network, and in a country whose currency and payments infrastructure wasn't going to scale outside the original borders very well.