For users not based in China, WeChat may simply serve as a messaging app for contacting friends currently living in China. Thousands of miniature apps extend WeChat’s capabilities to every service imaginableĪt its core, WeChat is a messaging and social media app that includes features from nearly every app currently on your phone. As I learned more of the language and became more entrenched in local Chinese student life, WeChat became a portal into an alternate Bloomington, where thousands of Chinese in southern Indiana come together to create their own social communities and economies entirely via WeChat channels. The only non-Chinese people who use it are usually those who have a specific connection to China. Was this it?įor most non-Chinese college students, WeChat is relatively unknown. I already knew WeChat was a cornerstone of Chinese online life - arguably the most powerful app in the world. Even basic navigation was illogical and confusing. The media feed was limited to low-quality photos for reasons I didn’t understand.
The design looked outdated, drenched in a hideous shade of green. When I opened up WeChat for the first time during freshman orientation at Indiana University (IU), I was amazed at how haphazard it was. The preference among Chinese consumers for an all-encompassing, holistic view plays very well with the reach of the WeChat ecosystem.For an app with over a billion users, WeChat doesn’t make a very strong first impression. This cultural difference may be a small contributing factor to WeChat’s success in China, and its lack of an equivalent in the West. Where Americans will hone in on the people contained in an image, Chinese people will typically look more at the background and the surrounding items. There is another layer to this, potentially.Ī wide range of studies has highlighted how differently Chinese and American consumers perceive their respective environments. Its success relies on its ownership of so many aspects of daily life, and this ownership would be nigh-on impossible to wrestle from Google or Facebook at this stage. The reality is that WeChat is quite unlikely to gain a serious foothold in the US. As such, that could help to expand WeChat’s reach to Western markets. Moreover, it has been reported that foreigners based in China have become even more addicted to the app than locals. There are now over 5 million WeChat users based in South Africa alone. This applies to the Chinese government as much as it does to WeChat, and these two strands are interconnected.Īs more and more Chinese workers move to Africa to work on government-funded projects, they tend to take their love of WeChat with them. We should first explore the capabilities that the WeChat app ecosystem provides for an active user base of almost one billion people before we can summarize the experience it offers.Īfrica has been a focus area for expansion, too.
#Wechat app full#
However, these comparisons do not tell the full story. It has an app store, so it has similarities with Apple and Google. It contains instant messaging, so it is like WhatsApp. This brings it into direct competition with Weibo in China.
WeChat is a major player in the social space, so in that sense it is a bit like Facebook. As a result, defining exactly what the WeChat app is today turns out to be a much more difficult task than it seems. From here, Tencent has added features and opened up the app to outside developers too. The addition of Moments was a particularly important milestone, as it brought with it a news feed featuring updates from friends and contacts.
Later rebranded ‘WeChat’ for an international market, the app soon started to encompass more features. In part, this instant success was down to the ability to make voice calls and leave voice messages, due to the more difficult nature of typing Chinese characters on a smartphone. This project took off quickly, with over 100 million registered users by 2012. Tencent launched an instant messaging app, Weixin, from its Guangzhou Research center in early 2011. First, some background: The history of WeChat
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