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On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

200 points by anuh 9y ago

nullnilvoid 9y ago
Although WeChat has less users than Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, WeChat is lightyears ahead of what the west can offer , in terms of product. It has many many useful features and is smooth, reliable. Even WhatsApp and Messenger are copying WeChat. One of the examples is WeChat payment. You can send money to any contact as a text message.
- joelrunyon 9y ago
  you can make payments in messenger too... https://www.facebook.com/help/863171203733904/ https://www.facebook.com/help/863171203733904/
  - nullnilvoid 9y ago
    Actually, WeChat had that feature way before Messenger did. Messenger basically copied that feature from WeChat.
  - captainhcg 9y ago
    `You can send or receive money in Messenger (example: send your friend $10 for lunch or receive $500 from your roommate for rent) after you add a debit card issued by a US bank to your account.` It requires you to bind your account with a debit card. I am using WeChat for years but I never attach my debit card to it, because I do not have a China debit card. When I need e-money, I just ask my family or give my friends some cash and they transfer e-money to me. That's all. Then I can use the e-money for offline shopping, online shopping, sending Hongbao (as gift-card). I do not understand why debit card is required.
    - chrisballinger 9y ago
      How does the money enter the network in the first place? You can use services like Venmo without linking payment information, but obviously you can't withdraw your balance.
      - versionx 9y ago
        One of the options that comes into mind - your could at money using payment terminals or buying a 'refill' card with a code. Not sure how it works on their case though
    - manuelflara 9y ago
      So where is that e-money coming from? You must be linking something... a bank account perhaps?
      - vertex-four 9y ago
        WeChat holds the money - it's like PayPal.
      - devy 9y ago
        Yes, WeChat wallet serves as a non-interest bearing escrow. So someone somehow has to link bank account/debit cards to infuse money into WeChat network first. You obviously need to link to your bank account in order to cash the balance out of WeChat. But given "90%" daily payment use-cases that WeChat covers, you are more likely to spend the balance somewhere than cash them out.
      - apexalpha 9y ago
        You can very easily link your Chinese bank account to the digital payment services like AliPay and WeChat. All you need is a Chinese bank account (UnionPay) and the phone number that you gave them when you setup the account. This is mandatory when you ask for an online banking account. All you do is enter the number on your bank card, they text you a code, you enter the code and the payment or linking of the account is confirmed.
    - captainhcg 9y ago
      - `How does the money enter the network in the first place? You can use services like Venmo without linking payment information, but obviously you can't withdraw your balance. reply` - `So where is that e-money coming from? You must be linking something... a bank account perhaps?` Nowadays most people have already linked their accounts with bank. But you still do not have to. When the feature first released in 2014, most people used the e-money for social purposes like sending gift cards and transferring small amount of cash; people just did not withdraw money. That's one of the most important reasons why WeChat won tens of millions e-money users in a very short period.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Try being a foreigner with a unionpay card but lacking a Chinese indentity card number. I heard it's better now, but that requirement was always a bummer for me in trying to do payments online.
      - rahimnathwani 9y ago
        That problem was solved (for at least the big banks: ICBC, BoC, CMB, CCB) for WeChat at least 2 years before you left China. For Alipay, it was already solved when I moved to China in 2010.
        seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        As recently as last year I had trouble setting up Uber in china because they wanted my Chinese ID number to go along with my Chinese credit card. Thing is, they wouldn't ask if I was using a non Chinese card.
        rahimnathwani 9y ago
        I have both Alipay and Baidu Wallet connected to my Uber China account. I haven't tried linking a Chinese bank card directly to Uber, but I don't have any reason to do that.
- nebabyte 9y ago
  > WeChat is lightyears ahead of what the west can offer , in terms of product. It has many many useful features and is smooth, reliable As a westerner, is there like a list of such use cases to help get the point across? The things I've read so far here sound like the kind of things we already have offerings for too (making travel easier or etc), just not usually all under one roof. Sending money via text is a great example, but reading more examples would be helpful in understanding, which is why I ask.
  - apexalpha 9y ago
    I have lived in China for 6 months, and from the top of my head: - Voice/Text Chat - (Video) calling - Payment service (like Apple or Android pay) - Buy movie tickets - Buy plane tickets - Send money via Chat. - Splitt the bills. - Pay the government (utility companies etc) directly from WeChat - Find people nearby (like tinder? But less so than TanTan) - Chat on desktop (like whatsapp web, but native client) - Log on to services (like FB or Google log on) - Share (real time) location with other people. - Translate text (Chinese <-> english) (Life saver for me) There were days when you would seriously just use WeChat, no other apps except maybe Baidu and AliPay. Anyway, there are more features I'm sure, these are just the ones I remember using.
    - jsfitzsimmons 9y ago
      Does it have end to end encryption though? That's kind of a killer feature.
      - eric_h 9y ago
        Other posts here suggest that WeChat actively censors posts, including in private chat, at the behest of the government, so no.
      - xanderstrike 9y ago
        No it has built-in tools for sharing your messages with state actors.
    - 9y ago
daveguy 9y ago
As a China-approved messenger application would anyone trust this as their primary mode of communication? This is not meant to be snarky or biased. Considering the control China has on citizen communication (eg the great firewall), what guarantee does anyone using the app have that all data isn't being fed through the Chinese version of the NSA? Also: how much of the growth can be attributed to less competition in the Chinese app market?
- dengnan 9y ago
  In short, there is no guarantee. Any message could be deleted at any time for no reason.
  - alexkon 9y ago
    How often do messages get deleted?
    - nayuki 9y ago
      Try sending a sensitive keyword.
      - mirimir 9y ago
        Maybe not if you're in China.
    - Markoff 9y ago
      often, they are very fast deleted from your Moments (Wall), heck is you use sensitive keyword they won't be even delivered to the other party in PRIVATE message, so much for this amazing messenger we should look up to
      - Danihan 9y ago
        Big government intervention is not the app's fault.
sprafa 9y ago
Basically : They design for value for users instead of, and they add features relentlessly instead of hitting product-market fit and stopping development until a competitor comes out with something good (looking at FB). This is probably due to the high level of competition and limited marketshare the firms in China are looking at. FB and Western firms want to rule the world, because they can, so they are still focusing on growth with iniciatives like internet.org. Chinese firms know their market is China, and they understand China, and it will be hard for them to export, so when they grow as big as WeChat the options are more limited. Their option was to build a whole ecosystem around it that could capture maximum user value. They also seem to prize their users religiously, which is great for them. But it might not have happened for them that way either if they were hopeful of capturing the entire world.
state 9y ago
"WeChat defies the popular belief that growth is all about user growth. Instead they think about growth as increasing value (e.g., the number of tasks WeChat can do in the daily lives of users). Unlike other social products, WeChat does not only measure growth by number of users or messages sent. Instead they also focus on measuring how deeply is the product engaged in every aspect of daily life (e.g., the number of tasks WeChat can help with in a day)." 100 times this. I can't think of a single large Western consumer software company who can actually think like that. It has become a commonplace that WeChat is incredible, and everyone over here wants to build it. But solving that problem is hard. Really hard.
- vtange 9y ago
  Isn't there inherent risk in centralizing / relying on one app for so many activities? There are already many in the West that try to avoid relying on everything Facebook or Google due to privacy/security concerns. I'm surprised that Chinese are willing to put all their eggs in WeChat's basket, given their belief that American apps spy on their users.
  - state 9y ago
    That's exactly what makes the problem so interesting. The user experience of WeChat is clearly great, but that level of centralization really wouldn't fly over here.
    - apexalpha 9y ago
      I don't know I don't think people care. Look at Google, the web is, in many parts of the Western world, mostly Google. Many people, including me, use *.google.com as a one-stop shop for all their software needs.
    - anuh 9y ago
      I think we are used to using multiple apps for different services because that is how it started. However if we were used to using one app for everything, things would have been different
ploggingdev 9y ago
Can something like WeChat work in the West? This is basically like an OS inside an app, you can book taxis, movie tickets, play games, send money etc. Having all the functionality integrated makes life easier, but comes at the cost of privacy : one company knows about your entire life.
- nullnilvoid 9y ago
  Don't Google and Facebook know about your entire life already?
  - akoncius 9y ago
    well yeah, but it doesn't mean that it is good in general
- Markoff 9y ago
  it can, it's called websites and you open them in browser, not sure why would I want wrapper app like Wechat to harvest all my data you can do pretty much all user car scenarios of what by opening google.com and gmail let's say (and i am saying this as someone who doesn't like Google ecosystem) the thing is meant if things which wechat does are pain in the ass to do in China, not so much in West, so there is no need for us to integrate it, for instance card payments are widespread in West, not do much in China so they came with online payments with QR codes, same goes for paying utilities, just open internet banking of your Bank and pay, it will be probably faster than paying within wechat i am telling you this as someone who lived in China for years and used all these services heck even within China i was pretty much using only for chatting, wall and small money transfers for sure not for buying plane tickets, Cinema tickets, paying utilities, etc., even for most of those there are cheaper options than their promoted partner, but yeah if you are dumb or lazy and dunno how to use internet them i can see how is wechat appealling
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  We have apps for that already. Even in china you can download and use the didi dache app rather than getting a taxi throb wechat.
thinkloop 9y ago
> Tencent was already one of China’s top internet companies in 2010, and the biggest social company even before WeChat was launched. > At the time, Tencent’s products had ~650M monthly active Instant Messenger accounts. Lesson 1: Start with 650m active users
- devy 9y ago
  No. WeChat started from scratch. None of the QQ users were ported to WeChat on day 1. You had to create a different account based on your mobile phone number just like any other mobile apps. You can, of course, use QQ credentials to login AFTER you created your WeChat account but you still have to create a WeChat account first and then link it to QQ. None of 650MM users were automatically created initially AFAIK. It was a "bold move" to cannibalize Tencent's own users in a way, after all.
  - anuh 9y ago
    Agreed. You could not import QQ contacts and in fact you could only add QQ contacts who were already on WeChat as "friends". So you had to discover WeChat on your own and could not invite a QQ user who had not yet discovered WeChat to join as a friend. WeChat did not ever push import all contacts from QQ to WeChat.
- suyash 9y ago
  Exactly, same is applicable to Facebook Messenger that leverage the growth of Facebook.com
devy 9y ago
> Lesson 1: Build Your Own Competition. This lesson is reminiscent of Amazon’s move ... and Uber’s move from town cars to UberX. If you don’t create a culture of disrupting yourself, then a competitor is likely to disrupt you. That is more or less what Travis Kalanick explained to the driver Kamel their decision to introduce UberX after UberBlack during that controversial video shot in an Uber ride 2 month ago.[1] [1]: https://www.recode.net/2017/2/28/14766964/video-uber-travis-kalanick-driver-argument https://www.recode.net/2017/2/28/14766964/video-uber-travis-...
apexalpha 9y ago
Having lived in China for 6 months I can say: if you build a mobile OS to just run WeChat embedded. It would work for 90% of what average users (so no, not you here on HN) want from a phone. Seriously. you can message, voice chat, call, video call, order plane tickets, split bills, order stuff online, buy movie tickets, pay utility bills, share photo's like FB timewall, create publics chatrooms, pay in physical stores and so much more. That app was ridiculous. Miles ahead of even the biggest dream of any app-central company in the Western world. They built up an entire ecosystem in one app. Obviously, it drained a lot of battery on Android. But Android itself is miles behind iOS anyway, since there is no Google in China and Android today is pretty much an empty shell without GPlay Services / Framework.
- nebabyte 9y ago
  > Seriously. you can message, voice chat, call, video call, order plane tickets, split bills, order stuff online, buy movie tickets, pay utility bills, share photo's like FB timewall, create publics chatrooms, pay in physical stores and so much more. ...All of that is handled within the app's runtime? (I would find it incredibly surprising if it did not hand off at least some of those to the phone layer.) Or if it is - I would be surprised if what you describe doesn't already exist there.
  - apexalpha 9y ago
    Some of the features I encountered where just webpages being loaded inside the app. Like the ticket buying. Possibly just using Android Webview. Except it did perfectly integrate with the (built in) Payment service in the app.
  - ganfortran 9y ago
    Wechat embedded a browser in itself. In that since it is more like Chrome Web Store.
  - dilemma 9y ago
    Some of those things are built on HTML5 and are not part of the app itself. They also let external companies and partners build these apps within WeChat to extend functionality (taxi, ticket booking, ordering food, etc.).
xbeta 9y ago
It really depends on your use cases. WeChat fits well in China as it is building a product exactly adding value for China culture and lifestyle there. You can make utilities payment via WeChat, but I would much prefer to have a platform automate this for me and not part of an IM. The West has been following the UNIX philosophy of doing 1 thing and does it very well. Perhaps WeChat is not just an app, but an eco-system. As for UX on strictly IM functionality, I would prefer WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Telegram etc as it is much "lean" and lightweight to use. I personally don't think WeChat can be successfully replicate their model to everywhere in the world. However, a lesson to learn for everyone (including WeChat), build local product. Builds product that fits everyone's need accommodating their culture and lifestyle.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- eratins 9y ago
  Is it really a "Western"-thing or more of a Silicon Valley thing? I really think Google could have created the ultimate chat app... but I guess they are "creating their own competition."
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    It's really a western thing. Chinese like crowded pages with lots of functionality, they must feel very 热闹!!! The west prefers more distribution of functionality with simplicity so doing one thing is much more appealing to us.
    - eratins 9y ago
      But when I was visiting Italy and Greece, I noticed the sites most people viewed were also very crowded and busy.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        Yes but not by choice. Besides, I've been to both Rome and Athens and didn't find either to be oarcicularly crowded compared to a Chinese tourist place.
nebabyte 9y ago
I thought I remembered reading something about apple frowning on apps-within-apps? I guess Wechat either sidesteps it by having everything be a 'profile' effectively just making it a chat app interfacing to other apps? Or maybe apple doesn't care about that restriction over there...?
Markoff 9y ago
TLDR Milestones - leave totalitarian government block all your competitors, be complacent and provide all your data to government, censor what people post on their public wall and in private messages as well yeah, if someone is looking up to privy like this I would recommend moving to China or North Korea where they can try to release their another inspirited product
- dang 9y ago
  This is not a good comment for Hacker News—it contains more inflammation than information. We're hoping to optimize for signal/noise ratio here, which heads in the opposite direction. If you'd comment accordingly, we'd appreciate it. Edit: unfortunately it looks like you've been posting plenty of unsubstantive and/or uncivil comments to Hacker News. We penalize accounts that do that and eventually ban them if they won't stop. Please (re-)read the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
  - Markoff 9y ago
    are you sure you are not ABC (judging by nickname) who lived in China less than me and it's just here supporting their totalitarian government based on fantasies you read about China online without clue about real life in China? Because that's the case of ABCs, they know less about China than non-Chinese living there... not sure what is not civil about my comments, I lived in China, I talk about Chinese app mentioned in article and provide what is behind real success of WeChat, which is not thanks to features they have, but thanks to government protection
    - eratins 9y ago
      So you are one of those bitter expats then (judging by your comments)?
      - Markoff 9y ago
machbio 9y ago
> Using voice messaging was strategic because the native mobile keyboard to type Chinese characters at the time was not easy to use and consumers found sending voice notes intuitive, personal and convenient for daily life. this is amazing way of thinking around the problem
- eratins 9y ago
  I find I use it more like the old Nextel days, where WeChat is essentially a type of walkie talkie.
misterbowfinger 9y ago
These are good lessons, but we have to consider whether a piece of WeChat's growth has to do with government backing. It's much easier to design for increasing user value if you don't have to worry about a marketing strategy. I'm not making a judgment on that - I'm just saying that it might not be applicable to all startups.
- anuh 9y ago
  WeChat had a lot of competition from Chinese mobile-first messaging apps when they started. It was by no means easy for them to scale and drive user growth.
matz1 9y ago
Unlike Facebook, using wechat on desktop is a pain. Also doesn't support multiple device.
- xbeta 9y ago
  Agreed. But their audiences are folks never need/own a desktop/laptop in the past. In China and many South-Asian countries, ownership of smartphones are higher than PC.
- rahimnathwani 9y ago
  "Also doesn't support multiple device." Not strictly true. You can log in a second device (e.g. web browser, tablet client, desktop client) by scanning a QR code with your primary device. My iPad is my secondary device. Not all messages are synced, but I can pick up my iPad to start or continue a conversation or do other stuff, without doing anything special. The full conversation history is only on my phone, though. The iPad only has the messages sent/received whilst I was actively using it.
abalone 9y ago
> We partnered up with China Tech Insights, a research group within Tencent (WeChat’s parent company) to understand how WeChat drives its 889 Million monthly active users... I've always wondered if WeChat benefitted from something particular to the Chinese context, for example, favorable government support.[1] This is not exactly the sort of stellar investigative methodology that's going to answer that question. In fact the article makes it sounds like it's all general business and design principles, yet fails to address why WeChat's success is specific to China. [1] "A successful stunt during last year’s celebration of Chinese New Year’s Eve saw CCTV, the official state broadcaster, offer millions of dollars in cash rewards to WeChat users who shook their phones on cue." http://www.economist.com/news/business/21703428-chinas-wechat-shows-way-social-medias-future-wechats-world http://www.economist.com/news/business/21703428-chinas-wecha...
- anuh 9y ago
  I think WeChat's specific success in China was really driven by WeChat payments and QR code - both of which failed in the US. These two features were critical to support so many use cases that WeChat enables today (payments, peer to peer transfers, offline to online service). Yes the Chinese New Year helped garner interest and a lot of people use WeChat to send red packets, they also connected their bank accounts and started using it for payments. This is again in line with how WeChat launches every feature. They try to launch it in groups rather than getting each individual user to try it separately.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    They failed in the US because the US has excellent credit card coverage while china (having lots of small scale retailers) does not. It was the right feature at the right time in the right place.
  - rahimnathwani 9y ago
    "WeChat's specific success in China was really driven by WeChat payments and QR code" WeChat was successful (in DAU/MAU) way before WeChat payments existed. WeChat payments couldn't have succeeded without the existing user base.
huula 9y ago
Now nobody talk about the "dating app" image wechat held in its early years, which brought it a lot of users.
- anuh 9y ago
  Yes. Shake and Message in a bottle features were used in that context in the early days.
corford 9y ago
Distilled down: fast execution with small tight dev teams, ruthless focus on adding direct user value/utility to every new feature (and choosing insightful metrics to validate this), management keeping their greed in check and an overriding culture/philosophy that good product is driven from understanding and respecting your users (don't waste their time, do value their attention, don't overcomplicate, don't needlessly monetise). Oh and incredible discipline and inventiveness in devising viral growth loops that don't break these rules. Nice & inspiring.
th3reverend 9y ago
is it bad that i got excited by the thought of high adoption rates of weechat (www.weechat.org) in china?
lewisl9029 9y ago
I remember watching this video a while ago by Nathan Freitas on the ability of the Chinese government to inspect, censor and control private communications through cooperation with apps like WeChat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk In it, Nathan brings up a very alarming point in that Chinese communication apps like WeChat have extremely robust inspection and censorship features built-in to the app, that were originally designed to be used by the Chinese government. Even though these features might not yet be enabled for WeChat users in countries outside of China, there is very little stopping an authoritarian government in a different state with widespread WeChat adoption from making use of these features if they just negotiated the right deals with TenCent, instantly gaining unprecedented powers in shaping private communications of its citizens, which can be an exceptionally powerful tool in detecting and quelling dissent. By exporting WeChat, China not just exporting a chat app, but also exporting a vital function of its Great Firewall: it's ability to control communications between citizens within it. Even for democratic states like India, where WeChat is starting to gain a foothold, this could pose a very real threat to freedom of speech if WeChat were ever to become dominant, and greatly increases the potential power of government should they ever want to overreach for it.
- dilemma 9y ago
  >By exporting WeChat, China not just exporting a chat app, but also exporting a vital function of its Great Firewall: it's ability to control communications between citizens within it. Even for democratic states like India, where WeChat is starting to gain a foothold, this could pose a very real threat to freedom of speech if WeChat were ever to become dominant, and greatly increases the potential power of government should they ever want to overreach for it. Reminds me of Facebook, Twitter, Google.
  - lewisl9029 9y ago
    Absolutely, between NSA's XKeyscore and all the for-profit corporate surveillance performed regularly in western companies, the only factors regular consumers have control over is a matter of what degree of surveillance they're willing to accept and which nation-states they would consider their adversary. This was one of the sentiments raised in Nathan's talk, and the aim of the talk was not to just aimlessly bash and scapegoat China and WeChat, but rather to suggest taking a hard look at ourselves and the choices we're making in terms of becoming complacent to or outright enabling authoritarianism, because there's a frightening number of parallels that can be drawn between China and WeChat and the US government and US tech corporations.
EnFinlay 9y ago
> To summarize, the WeChat team found ways to be scrappy, compete with their own products, built features that answered cultural needs and emphasized group interactions and most of all they have relentlessly focused on creating a simple tool that could extend into the hands of every mobile consumer. The summary misses the biggest lesson from the article! WeChat was able to get such amazing engagement and retention because it never attempted to milk a single facet for all it was worth. The model wasn't to maximize revenue before it broke the addiction.
dmix 9y ago
> Lesson 1: Build Your Own Competition Imagine cable/media companies or Blockbuster did what Tencent did with WeChat and Amazon did with Kindle? Focus on product development even if it means potentially cannibalizing you're existing business... Instead Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are totally dominating the marketplace for online video content and the TV studios will soon rely more and more on their platforms, platforms that are now spending billions to compete with them on content creation. Amazon is also publishing books too, competing with the bigger publishers to some extent [1]. They should consider going harder into this space like they did with movie/TV production. This is a great aspect of tech companies that 'traditional' ones continually overlook. Being future looking not protective. [1] https://kdp.amazon.com/signin?language=en_US https://kdp.amazon.com/signin?language=en_US
dangrover 9y ago
Former WeChat PM here. Good analysis. But annoyed that mot western coverage of the app focuses on the breadth of features/platform stuff and belies the many ways that it's an extremely solid messaging app compared to many. The choices made in the fundamentals (adding friends, creating groups, notifications) are all super well thought out. People using it will use it for communicating with strangers and conducting business, something you don't see in any messaging app in the US. The core messaging features are versatile and ultilitarian. And it's chock full of power user features like tags, notes, pinning threads, etc. The core team had spent 10 years working on email clients and services before embarking on it and it shows. This is the foundation the rest was built on.
- anuh 9y ago
  That's a fair point! I was also amazed into how much thought went into when to notify and really protecting user experience
- thewhitetulip 9y ago
  Your WeChat experience would be interesting, we can learn so much from it, clearly the app took over the Chinese ecosystem, so you guys did a lot of things right (which nobody has able to replicate). I would love to talk to you about it!
est 9y ago
Some secret weapons this article did not mention 1. Allen Zhang (Founder of WeChat) was the author of once popular desktop email client: Foxmail, and later Tencent acquired it, Zhang refactored a new version of web mail on mail.qq.com. In order to support Microsoft Exchange protocol, Zhang and his team reversed engineered it, this was later the foundation of Wechat's binary protocol design, in Zhang's words, it's magnitudes faster and robust than your XMPP copycat. It's designed to work well in extremely poor signal coverage area with only GPRS 2G online access. 2. Wechant literally stole telecom's SMS cake. Tencent put lots of effort striking deals with telecoms, ordinary IM startups might simply be blocked or QoS'd to death. 3. Tecent also pushed very hard to third-party Android ROM publishers to pre-install Wechat. It's like 2-5 RMB per new user acquisition and the app can not be deleted unless rooted. Tecent also negotiated to made sure Wechat app always stays in memory and can not be easily killed so push messages can be received, Be noted, because Google was fully stripped in all legit Android phones in China, there's no Google Play or GCM service, some other IM competitors are struggling to have basic message receiving capabilities. 4. Wechat is a lock-in mega app. Little known fact is it got a Tecent Browser (X5) fully builtin, it's an outdated Chromium build and its behavior is kinda headache to debug compared to othe mobile browsers like Chrome or Mobile Safari, lots of customised JS bridges and restrictions. The evil part is that every link you view in wechat must renders exclusively in X5. E.g. if you open a youtube page, it renders in webview in wechat, if you have youtube app installed and wanna view the URL link in app, you have to click for the wechat menu, open the webpage in system browser, so your waste your data bandwidth for the second time and opens the exact webpage, and click "Open in App". This ensures engagement times. 5. Wechat blocks competitor URLs for obvious reasons, e.g. *.taobao.com domain since day 1 because "the link looks malicious and may harm your device". It force users to choose Tencent equivalents(JingDong).
- shouldbworking 9y ago
  Wow. I was impressed but now I'm kind of glad we don't have that kind of monopoly in the US. Google is in the same arena but we have several strong competitors for most of their products at least.
- lawik 9y ago
  Even if the team is lean the article made the product seem very heavy, all-in-one. I have a hard time seeing success with that in the west these days. Feature-filled communities was definitely a big thing once. I get that a partnered article won't cover these kinds of practices. However it does leave a bad taste in my mouth to see this unapologetic praise in the article for what seems to be a monolithic monopoly play.
kalasoo 9y ago
There is one important spot the article misses to mention is its extremely great usability among different groups of people. People who are young or old, well-educated or poor, artistic or professional use WeChat as a communication tool. Unlike many other apps who concentrate on serving young people, business people or colleagues, WeChat is the ultimate solution for me to talk with my classmates, my parents or even a courier who I just meet 3-minutes ago. This makes it stand out from just an app working above the operating system, but a common solution people on mobile just like phone call or messages. This makes WeChat special.

200 points by anuh 9y ago

Although WeChat has less users than Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, WeChat is lightyears ahead of what the west can offer , in terms of product. It has many many useful features and is smooth, reliable. Even WhatsApp and Messenger are copying WeChat. One of the examples is WeChat payment. You can send money to any contact as a text message.

joelrunyon 9y ago
you can make payments in messenger too... https://www.facebook.com/help/863171203733904/ https://www.facebook.com/help/863171203733904/
- nullnilvoid 9y ago
  Actually, WeChat had that feature way before Messenger did. Messenger basically copied that feature from WeChat.
- captainhcg 9y ago
  `You can send or receive money in Messenger (example: send your friend $10 for lunch or receive $500 from your roommate for rent) after you add a debit card issued by a US bank to your account.` It requires you to bind your account with a debit card. I am using WeChat for years but I never attach my debit card to it, because I do not have a China debit card. When I need e-money, I just ask my family or give my friends some cash and they transfer e-money to me. That's all. Then I can use the e-money for offline shopping, online shopping, sending Hongbao (as gift-card). I do not understand why debit card is required.
  - chrisballinger 9y ago
    How does the money enter the network in the first place? You can use services like Venmo without linking payment information, but obviously you can't withdraw your balance.
    - versionx 9y ago
      One of the options that comes into mind - your could at money using payment terminals or buying a 'refill' card with a code. Not sure how it works on their case though
  - manuelflara 9y ago
    So where is that e-money coming from? You must be linking something... a bank account perhaps?
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      WeChat holds the money - it's like PayPal.
    - devy 9y ago
      Yes, WeChat wallet serves as a non-interest bearing escrow. So someone somehow has to link bank account/debit cards to infuse money into WeChat network first. You obviously need to link to your bank account in order to cash the balance out of WeChat. But given "90%" daily payment use-cases that WeChat covers, you are more likely to spend the balance somewhere than cash them out.
    - apexalpha 9y ago
      You can very easily link your Chinese bank account to the digital payment services like AliPay and WeChat. All you need is a Chinese bank account (UnionPay) and the phone number that you gave them when you setup the account. This is mandatory when you ask for an online banking account. All you do is enter the number on your bank card, they text you a code, you enter the code and the payment or linking of the account is confirmed.
  - captainhcg 9y ago
    - `How does the money enter the network in the first place? You can use services like Venmo without linking payment information, but obviously you can't withdraw your balance. reply` - `So where is that e-money coming from? You must be linking something... a bank account perhaps?` Nowadays most people have already linked their accounts with bank. But you still do not have to. When the feature first released in 2014, most people used the e-money for social purposes like sending gift cards and transferring small amount of cash; people just did not withdraw money. That's one of the most important reasons why WeChat won tens of millions e-money users in a very short period.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Try being a foreigner with a unionpay card but lacking a Chinese indentity card number. I heard it's better now, but that requirement was always a bummer for me in trying to do payments online.
    - rahimnathwani 9y ago
      That problem was solved (for at least the big banks: ICBC, BoC, CMB, CCB) for WeChat at least 2 years before you left China. For Alipay, it was already solved when I moved to China in 2010.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        As recently as last year I had trouble setting up Uber in china because they wanted my Chinese ID number to go along with my Chinese credit card. Thing is, they wouldn't ask if I was using a non Chinese card.
        rahimnathwani 9y ago
        I have both Alipay and Baidu Wallet connected to my Uber China account. I haven't tried linking a Chinese bank card directly to Uber, but I don't have any reason to do that.
nebabyte 9y ago
> WeChat is lightyears ahead of what the west can offer , in terms of product. It has many many useful features and is smooth, reliable As a westerner, is there like a list of such use cases to help get the point across? The things I've read so far here sound like the kind of things we already have offerings for too (making travel easier or etc), just not usually all under one roof. Sending money via text is a great example, but reading more examples would be helpful in understanding, which is why I ask.
- apexalpha 9y ago
  I have lived in China for 6 months, and from the top of my head: - Voice/Text Chat - (Video) calling - Payment service (like Apple or Android pay) - Buy movie tickets - Buy plane tickets - Send money via Chat. - Splitt the bills. - Pay the government (utility companies etc) directly from WeChat - Find people nearby (like tinder? But less so than TanTan) - Chat on desktop (like whatsapp web, but native client) - Log on to services (like FB or Google log on) - Share (real time) location with other people. - Translate text (Chinese <-> english) (Life saver for me) There were days when you would seriously just use WeChat, no other apps except maybe Baidu and AliPay. Anyway, there are more features I'm sure, these are just the ones I remember using.
  - jsfitzsimmons 9y ago
    Does it have end to end encryption though? That's kind of a killer feature.
    - eric_h 9y ago
      Other posts here suggest that WeChat actively censors posts, including in private chat, at the behest of the government, so no.
    - xanderstrike 9y ago
      No it has built-in tools for sharing your messages with state actors.
  - 9y ago

daveguy 9y ago

As a China-approved messenger application would anyone trust this as their primary mode of communication? This is not meant to be snarky or biased. Considering the control China has on citizen communication (eg the great firewall), what guarantee does anyone using the app have that all data isn't being fed through the Chinese version of the NSA? Also: how much of the growth can be attributed to less competition in the Chinese app market?

dengnan 9y ago
In short, there is no guarantee. Any message could be deleted at any time for no reason.
- alexkon 9y ago
  How often do messages get deleted?
  - nayuki 9y ago
    Try sending a sensitive keyword.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      Maybe not if you're in China.
  - Markoff 9y ago
    often, they are very fast deleted from your Moments (Wall), heck is you use sensitive keyword they won't be even delivered to the other party in PRIVATE message, so much for this amazing messenger we should look up to
    - Danihan 9y ago
      Big government intervention is not the app's fault.

sprafa 9y ago

Basically : They design for value for users instead of, and they add features relentlessly instead of hitting product-market fit and stopping development until a competitor comes out with something good (looking at FB). This is probably due to the high level of competition and limited marketshare the firms in China are looking at. FB and Western firms want to rule the world, because they can, so they are still focusing on growth with iniciatives like internet.org. Chinese firms know their market is China, and they understand China, and it will be hard for them to export, so when they grow as big as WeChat the options are more limited. Their option was to build a whole ecosystem around it that could capture maximum user value. They also seem to prize their users religiously, which is great for them. But it might not have happened for them that way either if they were hopeful of capturing the entire world.

state 9y ago

"WeChat defies the popular belief that growth is all about user growth. Instead they think about growth as increasing value (e.g., the number of tasks WeChat can do in the daily lives of users). Unlike other social products, WeChat does not only measure growth by number of users or messages sent. Instead they also focus on measuring how deeply is the product engaged in every aspect of daily life (e.g., the number of tasks WeChat can help with in a day)." 100 times this. I can't think of a single large Western consumer software company who can actually think like that. It has become a commonplace that WeChat is incredible, and everyone over here wants to build it. But solving that problem is hard. Really hard.

vtange 9y ago
Isn't there inherent risk in centralizing / relying on one app for so many activities? There are already many in the West that try to avoid relying on everything Facebook or Google due to privacy/security concerns. I'm surprised that Chinese are willing to put all their eggs in WeChat's basket, given their belief that American apps spy on their users.
- state 9y ago
  That's exactly what makes the problem so interesting. The user experience of WeChat is clearly great, but that level of centralization really wouldn't fly over here.
  - apexalpha 9y ago
    I don't know I don't think people care. Look at Google, the web is, in many parts of the Western world, mostly Google. Many people, including me, use *.google.com as a one-stop shop for all their software needs.
  - anuh 9y ago
    I think we are used to using multiple apps for different services because that is how it started. However if we were used to using one app for everything, things would have been different

ploggingdev 9y ago

Can something like WeChat work in the West? This is basically like an OS inside an app, you can book taxis, movie tickets, play games, send money etc. Having all the functionality integrated makes life easier, but comes at the cost of privacy : one company knows about your entire life.

nullnilvoid 9y ago
Don't Google and Facebook know about your entire life already?
- akoncius 9y ago
  well yeah, but it doesn't mean that it is good in general
Markoff 9y ago
it can, it's called websites and you open them in browser, not sure why would I want wrapper app like Wechat to harvest all my data you can do pretty much all user car scenarios of what by opening google.com and gmail let's say (and i am saying this as someone who doesn't like Google ecosystem) the thing is meant if things which wechat does are pain in the ass to do in China, not so much in West, so there is no need for us to integrate it, for instance card payments are widespread in West, not do much in China so they came with online payments with QR codes, same goes for paying utilities, just open internet banking of your Bank and pay, it will be probably faster than paying within wechat i am telling you this as someone who lived in China for years and used all these services heck even within China i was pretty much using only for chatting, wall and small money transfers for sure not for buying plane tickets, Cinema tickets, paying utilities, etc., even for most of those there are cheaper options than their promoted partner, but yeah if you are dumb or lazy and dunno how to use internet them i can see how is wechat appealling
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
We have apps for that already. Even in china you can download and use the didi dache app rather than getting a taxi throb wechat.

thinkloop 9y ago

> Tencent was already one of China’s top internet companies in 2010, and the biggest social company even before WeChat was launched. > At the time, Tencent’s products had ~650M monthly active Instant Messenger accounts. Lesson 1: Start with 650m active users

devy 9y ago
No. WeChat started from scratch. None of the QQ users were ported to WeChat on day 1. You had to create a different account based on your mobile phone number just like any other mobile apps. You can, of course, use QQ credentials to login AFTER you created your WeChat account but you still have to create a WeChat account first and then link it to QQ. None of 650MM users were automatically created initially AFAIK. It was a "bold move" to cannibalize Tencent's own users in a way, after all.
- anuh 9y ago
  Agreed. You could not import QQ contacts and in fact you could only add QQ contacts who were already on WeChat as "friends". So you had to discover WeChat on your own and could not invite a QQ user who had not yet discovered WeChat to join as a friend. WeChat did not ever push import all contacts from QQ to WeChat.
suyash 9y ago
Exactly, same is applicable to Facebook Messenger that leverage the growth of Facebook.com

devy 9y ago

> Lesson 1: Build Your Own Competition. This lesson is reminiscent of Amazon’s move ... and Uber’s move from town cars to UberX. If you don’t create a culture of disrupting yourself, then a competitor is likely to disrupt you. That is more or less what Travis Kalanick explained to the driver Kamel their decision to introduce UberX after UberBlack during that controversial video shot in an Uber ride 2 month ago.[1] [1]: https://www.recode.net/2017/2/28/14766964/video-uber-travis-kalanick-driver-argument https://www.recode.net/2017/2/28/14766964/video-uber-travis-...

apexalpha 9y ago

Having lived in China for 6 months I can say: if you build a mobile OS to just run WeChat embedded. It would work for 90% of what average users (so no, not you here on HN) want from a phone. Seriously. you can message, voice chat, call, video call, order plane tickets, split bills, order stuff online, buy movie tickets, pay utility bills, share photo's like FB timewall, create publics chatrooms, pay in physical stores and so much more. That app was ridiculous. Miles ahead of even the biggest dream of any app-central company in the Western world. They built up an entire ecosystem in one app. Obviously, it drained a lot of battery on Android. But Android itself is miles behind iOS anyway, since there is no Google in China and Android today is pretty much an empty shell without GPlay Services / Framework.

nebabyte 9y ago
> Seriously. you can message, voice chat, call, video call, order plane tickets, split bills, order stuff online, buy movie tickets, pay utility bills, share photo's like FB timewall, create publics chatrooms, pay in physical stores and so much more. ...All of that is handled within the app's runtime? (I would find it incredibly surprising if it did not hand off at least some of those to the phone layer.) Or if it is - I would be surprised if what you describe doesn't already exist there.
- apexalpha 9y ago
  Some of the features I encountered where just webpages being loaded inside the app. Like the ticket buying. Possibly just using Android Webview. Except it did perfectly integrate with the (built in) Payment service in the app.
- ganfortran 9y ago
  Wechat embedded a browser in itself. In that since it is more like Chrome Web Store.
- dilemma 9y ago
  Some of those things are built on HTML5 and are not part of the app itself. They also let external companies and partners build these apps within WeChat to extend functionality (taxi, ticket booking, ordering food, etc.).

xbeta 9y ago

It really depends on your use cases. WeChat fits well in China as it is building a product exactly adding value for China culture and lifestyle there. You can make utilities payment via WeChat, but I would much prefer to have a platform automate this for me and not part of an IM. The West has been following the UNIX philosophy of doing 1 thing and does it very well. Perhaps WeChat is not just an app, but an eco-system. As for UX on strictly IM functionality, I would prefer WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Telegram etc as it is much "lean" and lightweight to use. I personally don't think WeChat can be successfully replicate their model to everywhere in the world. However, a lesson to learn for everyone (including WeChat), build local product. Builds product that fits everyone's need accommodating their culture and lifestyle.

deleted 9y ago
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eratins 9y ago
Is it really a "Western"-thing or more of a Silicon Valley thing? I really think Google could have created the ultimate chat app... but I guess they are "creating their own competition."
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  It's really a western thing. Chinese like crowded pages with lots of functionality, they must feel very 热闹!!! The west prefers more distribution of functionality with simplicity so doing one thing is much more appealing to us.
  - eratins 9y ago
    But when I was visiting Italy and Greece, I noticed the sites most people viewed were also very crowded and busy.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Yes but not by choice. Besides, I've been to both Rome and Athens and didn't find either to be oarcicularly crowded compared to a Chinese tourist place.

nebabyte 9y ago

I thought I remembered reading something about apple frowning on apps-within-apps? I guess Wechat either sidesteps it by having everything be a 'profile' effectively just making it a chat app interfacing to other apps? Or maybe apple doesn't care about that restriction over there...?

Markoff 9y ago

TLDR Milestones - leave totalitarian government block all your competitors, be complacent and provide all your data to government, censor what people post on their public wall and in private messages as well yeah, if someone is looking up to privy like this I would recommend moving to China or North Korea where they can try to release their another inspirited product

dang 9y ago
This is not a good comment for Hacker News—it contains more inflammation than information. We're hoping to optimize for signal/noise ratio here, which heads in the opposite direction. If you'd comment accordingly, we'd appreciate it. Edit: unfortunately it looks like you've been posting plenty of unsubstantive and/or uncivil comments to Hacker News. We penalize accounts that do that and eventually ban them if they won't stop. Please (re-)read the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- Markoff 9y ago
  are you sure you are not ABC (judging by nickname) who lived in China less than me and it's just here supporting their totalitarian government based on fantasies you read about China online without clue about real life in China? Because that's the case of ABCs, they know less about China than non-Chinese living there... not sure what is not civil about my comments, I lived in China, I talk about Chinese app mentioned in article and provide what is behind real success of WeChat, which is not thanks to features they have, but thanks to government protection
  - eratins 9y ago
    So you are one of those bitter expats then (judging by your comments)?
    - Markoff 9y ago

machbio 9y ago

> Using voice messaging was strategic because the native mobile keyboard to type Chinese characters at the time was not easy to use and consumers found sending voice notes intuitive, personal and convenient for daily life. this is amazing way of thinking around the problem

eratins 9y ago
I find I use it more like the old Nextel days, where WeChat is essentially a type of walkie talkie.

misterbowfinger 9y ago

These are good lessons, but we have to consider whether a piece of WeChat's growth has to do with government backing. It's much easier to design for increasing user value if you don't have to worry about a marketing strategy. I'm not making a judgment on that - I'm just saying that it might not be applicable to all startups.

anuh 9y ago
WeChat had a lot of competition from Chinese mobile-first messaging apps when they started. It was by no means easy for them to scale and drive user growth.

matz1 9y ago

Unlike Facebook, using wechat on desktop is a pain. Also doesn't support multiple device.

xbeta 9y ago
Agreed. But their audiences are folks never need/own a desktop/laptop in the past. In China and many South-Asian countries, ownership of smartphones are higher than PC.
rahimnathwani 9y ago
"Also doesn't support multiple device." Not strictly true. You can log in a second device (e.g. web browser, tablet client, desktop client) by scanning a QR code with your primary device. My iPad is my secondary device. Not all messages are synced, but I can pick up my iPad to start or continue a conversation or do other stuff, without doing anything special. The full conversation history is only on my phone, though. The iPad only has the messages sent/received whilst I was actively using it.

abalone 9y ago

> We partnered up with China Tech Insights, a research group within Tencent (WeChat’s parent company) to understand how WeChat drives its 889 Million monthly active users... I've always wondered if WeChat benefitted from something particular to the Chinese context, for example, favorable government support.[1] This is not exactly the sort of stellar investigative methodology that's going to answer that question. In fact the article makes it sounds like it's all general business and design principles, yet fails to address why WeChat's success is specific to China. [1] "A successful stunt during last year’s celebration of Chinese New Year’s Eve saw CCTV, the official state broadcaster, offer millions of dollars in cash rewards to WeChat users who shook their phones on cue." http://www.economist.com/news/business/21703428-chinas-wechat-shows-way-social-medias-future-wechats-world http://www.economist.com/news/business/21703428-chinas-wecha...

anuh 9y ago
I think WeChat's specific success in China was really driven by WeChat payments and QR code - both of which failed in the US. These two features were critical to support so many use cases that WeChat enables today (payments, peer to peer transfers, offline to online service). Yes the Chinese New Year helped garner interest and a lot of people use WeChat to send red packets, they also connected their bank accounts and started using it for payments. This is again in line with how WeChat launches every feature. They try to launch it in groups rather than getting each individual user to try it separately.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  They failed in the US because the US has excellent credit card coverage while china (having lots of small scale retailers) does not. It was the right feature at the right time in the right place.
- rahimnathwani 9y ago
  "WeChat's specific success in China was really driven by WeChat payments and QR code" WeChat was successful (in DAU/MAU) way before WeChat payments existed. WeChat payments couldn't have succeeded without the existing user base.

huula 9y ago

Now nobody talk about the "dating app" image wechat held in its early years, which brought it a lot of users.

anuh 9y ago
Yes. Shake and Message in a bottle features were used in that context in the early days.

corford 9y ago

Distilled down: fast execution with small tight dev teams, ruthless focus on adding direct user value/utility to every new feature (and choosing insightful metrics to validate this), management keeping their greed in check and an overriding culture/philosophy that good product is driven from understanding and respecting your users (don't waste their time, do value their attention, don't overcomplicate, don't needlessly monetise). Oh and incredible discipline and inventiveness in devising viral growth loops that don't break these rules. Nice & inspiring.

th3reverend 9y ago

is it bad that i got excited by the thought of high adoption rates of weechat (www.weechat.org) in china?

lewisl9029 9y ago

I remember watching this video a while ago by Nathan Freitas on the ability of the Chinese government to inspect, censor and control private communications through cooperation with apps like WeChat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk In it, Nathan brings up a very alarming point in that Chinese communication apps like WeChat have extremely robust inspection and censorship features built-in to the app, that were originally designed to be used by the Chinese government. Even though these features might not yet be enabled for WeChat users in countries outside of China, there is very little stopping an authoritarian government in a different state with widespread WeChat adoption from making use of these features if they just negotiated the right deals with TenCent, instantly gaining unprecedented powers in shaping private communications of its citizens, which can be an exceptionally powerful tool in detecting and quelling dissent. By exporting WeChat, China not just exporting a chat app, but also exporting a vital function of its Great Firewall: it's ability to control communications between citizens within it. Even for democratic states like India, where WeChat is starting to gain a foothold, this could pose a very real threat to freedom of speech if WeChat were ever to become dominant, and greatly increases the potential power of government should they ever want to overreach for it.

dilemma 9y ago
>By exporting WeChat, China not just exporting a chat app, but also exporting a vital function of its Great Firewall: it's ability to control communications between citizens within it. Even for democratic states like India, where WeChat is starting to gain a foothold, this could pose a very real threat to freedom of speech if WeChat were ever to become dominant, and greatly increases the potential power of government should they ever want to overreach for it. Reminds me of Facebook, Twitter, Google.
- lewisl9029 9y ago
  Absolutely, between NSA's XKeyscore and all the for-profit corporate surveillance performed regularly in western companies, the only factors regular consumers have control over is a matter of what degree of surveillance they're willing to accept and which nation-states they would consider their adversary. This was one of the sentiments raised in Nathan's talk, and the aim of the talk was not to just aimlessly bash and scapegoat China and WeChat, but rather to suggest taking a hard look at ourselves and the choices we're making in terms of becoming complacent to or outright enabling authoritarianism, because there's a frightening number of parallels that can be drawn between China and WeChat and the US government and US tech corporations.

EnFinlay 9y ago

> To summarize, the WeChat team found ways to be scrappy, compete with their own products, built features that answered cultural needs and emphasized group interactions and most of all they have relentlessly focused on creating a simple tool that could extend into the hands of every mobile consumer. The summary misses the biggest lesson from the article! WeChat was able to get such amazing engagement and retention because it never attempted to milk a single facet for all it was worth. The model wasn't to maximize revenue before it broke the addiction.

dmix 9y ago

> Lesson 1: Build Your Own Competition Imagine cable/media companies or Blockbuster did what Tencent did with WeChat and Amazon did with Kindle? Focus on product development even if it means potentially cannibalizing you're existing business... Instead Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are totally dominating the marketplace for online video content and the TV studios will soon rely more and more on their platforms, platforms that are now spending billions to compete with them on content creation. Amazon is also publishing books too, competing with the bigger publishers to some extent [1]. They should consider going harder into this space like they did with movie/TV production. This is a great aspect of tech companies that 'traditional' ones continually overlook. Being future looking not protective. [1] https://kdp.amazon.com/signin?language=en_US https://kdp.amazon.com/signin?language=en_US

dangrover 9y ago

Former WeChat PM here. Good analysis. But annoyed that mot western coverage of the app focuses on the breadth of features/platform stuff and belies the many ways that it's an extremely solid messaging app compared to many. The choices made in the fundamentals (adding friends, creating groups, notifications) are all super well thought out. People using it will use it for communicating with strangers and conducting business, something you don't see in any messaging app in the US. The core messaging features are versatile and ultilitarian. And it's chock full of power user features like tags, notes, pinning threads, etc. The core team had spent 10 years working on email clients and services before embarking on it and it shows. This is the foundation the rest was built on.

anuh 9y ago
That's a fair point! I was also amazed into how much thought went into when to notify and really protecting user experience
thewhitetulip 9y ago
Your WeChat experience would be interesting, we can learn so much from it, clearly the app took over the Chinese ecosystem, so you guys did a lot of things right (which nobody has able to replicate). I would love to talk to you about it!

est 9y ago

Some secret weapons this article did not mention 1. Allen Zhang (Founder of WeChat) was the author of once popular desktop email client: Foxmail, and later Tencent acquired it, Zhang refactored a new version of web mail on mail.qq.com. In order to support Microsoft Exchange protocol, Zhang and his team reversed engineered it, this was later the foundation of Wechat's binary protocol design, in Zhang's words, it's magnitudes faster and robust than your XMPP copycat. It's designed to work well in extremely poor signal coverage area with only GPRS 2G online access. 2. Wechant literally stole telecom's SMS cake. Tencent put lots of effort striking deals with telecoms, ordinary IM startups might simply be blocked or QoS'd to death. 3. Tecent also pushed very hard to third-party Android ROM publishers to pre-install Wechat. It's like 2-5 RMB per new user acquisition and the app can not be deleted unless rooted. Tecent also negotiated to made sure Wechat app always stays in memory and can not be easily killed so push messages can be received, Be noted, because Google was fully stripped in all legit Android phones in China, there's no Google Play or GCM service, some other IM competitors are struggling to have basic message receiving capabilities. 4. Wechat is a lock-in mega app. Little known fact is it got a Tecent Browser (X5) fully builtin, it's an outdated Chromium build and its behavior is kinda headache to debug compared to othe mobile browsers like Chrome or Mobile Safari, lots of customised JS bridges and restrictions. The evil part is that every link you view in wechat must renders exclusively in X5. E.g. if you open a youtube page, it renders in webview in wechat, if you have youtube app installed and wanna view the URL link in app, you have to click for the wechat menu, open the webpage in system browser, so your waste your data bandwidth for the second time and opens the exact webpage, and click "Open in App". This ensures engagement times. 5. Wechat blocks competitor URLs for obvious reasons, e.g. *.taobao.com domain since day 1 because "the link looks malicious and may harm your device". It force users to choose Tencent equivalents(JingDong).

shouldbworking 9y ago
Wow. I was impressed but now I'm kind of glad we don't have that kind of monopoly in the US. Google is in the same arena but we have several strong competitors for most of their products at least.
lawik 9y ago
Even if the team is lean the article made the product seem very heavy, all-in-one. I have a hard time seeing success with that in the west these days. Feature-filled communities was definitely a big thing once. I get that a partnered article won't cover these kinds of practices. However it does leave a bad taste in my mouth to see this unapologetic praise in the article for what seems to be a monolithic monopoly play.

kalasoo 9y ago

There is one important spot the article misses to mention is its extremely great usability among different groups of people. People who are young or old, well-educated or poor, artistic or professional use WeChat as a communication tool. Unlike many other apps who concentrate on serving young people, business people or colleagues, WeChat is the ultimate solution for me to talk with my classmates, my parents or even a courier who I just meet 3-minutes ago. This makes it stand out from just an app working above the operating system, but a common solution people on mobile just like phone call or messages. This makes WeChat special.