4 ms·

Thats a fair point that asks 'Why did WeChat become the upper/middle city class chat app of choice over QQ and others' and I'd love for someone to weigh in ther

• seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  QQ didn't require a smartphone, while WeChat did. You can basically see WeChat adoption as being correlated with smartphone adoption (and the middle class adopted them first). Also, young people are more likely to use QQ than WeChat because QQ is anonymous and focuses on gaming, they are much less interested in WeChat's location-based and commerce features. Note that QQ and WeChat are both Tencent, they aren't meant to be in direct competition with each other.
• cmplxconjugate 9y ago
  Well I'd like to point out that 微信 (WeChat) does require a personal bank card in order for monies to be transferred/stored on a persons account. I think the two main contenders for payment apps are Wexin and Alipay (支付宝). Both are vastly more popular than QQ these days. WeChat and its dominance in its early days to a number of factors. Primarily in its infancy this is: good advertising, uniqueness compared to QQ (think MySpace -> FB), solid interface and voice memos. Voice memos were a killer feature that is massively more popular than in England (my experience) and I assume most of the West. Later on payments were added which enables anyone to have a business (receive money for services) and huge convenience for shopping or sending money to friends. Alipay at the moment is less focused on social media like WeChat and more on interlinking services (Cinema, Shopping, Mobile payments, Utilities, Lifestyle etc). Also there's a massive advertisement campaign driving its use; currently each 24 hours users can scan a red envelope (红包) QR code an receive credit on their balance. I've receive $4~5 dollars a day, with an average of $1. Thats a free breakfast for most people.
  • shalmanese 9y ago
    Typing Chinese is significantly harder than typing English. Thus, voice memos offer a superior user experience. Building in Voice Memos as a first class feature into the messaging UI was what got WeChat its initial push.
    • justinhj 9y ago
      I don’t think that’s true with predictive text
      • shalmanese 9y ago
        It is. Even proficient Chinese typists are significantly slower than English typists.
        • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
          That really isn't true, even with a pinyin IME. More so if are talking about spoken Chinese (used for chat) vs. more colloquial written Chinese. Prediction really does speed things up (on my old nokia back in 2002 I used to be able to text faster in Chinese than in English).
        • xbeta 9y ago
          Have you seen people type Chinese in a T9 keyboard? My wife grew up in China and typed using that method and faster than her English typing.
    • smallnamespace 9y ago
      Not really true IMO, because you can even use initialisms to type entire phrases and sentences in pinyin and omit most of the characters. Let's say you wanted to write 我很喜欢吃汉堡 (I really like eating hamburgers), you can get away with just typing 'w h x h ch han bao' and predictive text gets you the entire sentence. Chinese text is well optimized towards readability and information density, at the expense of taking a lot of work to manually write, but that calculus completely changes if your writing system is smart enough.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • DashRattlesnake 9y ago
        But that assumes a lot fluency with pinyin and the prediction system. A lot of people are missing one or both.