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).
Just goes to show you....execution is all that matters. If you can force your crappy app onto hundreds of millions of devices through your deal-making capabilities, you'll have the same success that a viral sensation would have.
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.
"the article made the product seem very heavy, all-in-one"
This is what amazes me. WeChat has lots and lots of features, but doesn't feel heavy at all. The messaging UI is both clean (no unnecessary clutter; snappy) and feature-rich (can send text, start a voice chat, send money, send a voice message). Some of the other features that you might not use every day (like paying utility bills, topping up mobile) are in a separate 'Wallet' section which actually looks a bit like the Alipay app.
It is not a monopoly play by any means. Alipay is a big competitor of TencentPay and bigger than WeChatPay. Also though the app supports so many features and services, it has a really simple UI. The user has to go hunt the various features and they don't send too many push notifications either. You have to really know the ins and outs of it to know where to access some of the features.
WeChat actually feels very light and has a way better UI than WhatsApp and Facebook Chat - though they rather slowly now copy it from WeChat. Crazy times, as now US has to copy the Chinese competition which is now like 2-3 years ahead.
it's ahead only if you think those markets are comparable, people outside China don't desire this functinality since they have many other good options, people in China has horrible options so WeChat looks actually pretty good to them and they use additional functionality on top of chat/wall
I lived in China since beginning of growth of WeChat and could see it in front of my eyes, in beginning it was very simple messenger and they kept growing userbase and adding more and more functionality, though you end up being locked in in their ecosystem, as was mentioned taobao links are blocked and those options under Wallet section are mostly not the best value, so I pretty much avoided those added functionality. Heck I rather top up electricity through Alipay, since it was easier than WeChat or some companies didn't have contracts with them.
anyway back to your comment, you say they are ahead of Whatsapp and Facebook, but please tell me in what exactly they are ahead, in selling tickets, paying utilities and sending money through messenger app? do people outside China desire this? if people don't desire it, they are not ahead, people in west have fast wire transfers, can pay pretty much anywhere in card so there is no necessity for such functionality, I could go on and on if you tell me in what area they are exactly ahead since I lived in China for years and I live in west so I can compare
Yes, WeChat is extremely convenient for life in China. Is it convenient and good app for life outside China? Hell no, I don't want and I don't need those features from Messenger, since we don't have blocked internet I can visit whatever website I want and use their services without state protectionism.
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.
Many portions of this reply are categorically and maliciously false including:
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."
Amongst WeChat's many local competitors were equivalent messaging apps including China Mobile's "Feixin" messaging app and China Telecom/Netease's "Yixin". Both competitors, as officially published apps from the telcos themselves, had the ability to leverage free SMS messaging, an ability that WeChat did not have access to. WeChat is considered a tangential competitor to the telcos.
WeChat doesn't block or QoS other IM products. That would be illegal and, frankly, a PR fiasco in addition to a great way to lose user trust.
3) It's against WeChat values to push mobile phone makers, distributors, or ROM publishers to preinstall WeChat for pay. In addition to being against WeChat values, it's also a big hassle as preinstalls require careful version management. Due to the popularity of the app and the relatively high cost of data for many low-end users, many of these distributors have voluntarily preinstalled certain popular apps including WeChat as a convenience to their consumers. WeChat did not "negotiate" to keep WeChat app in memory -- I'm not sure where you're information comes from. For users within China where Google Cloud Messaging is not an option, a background process for Android continues running to receive push notifications from a notifications server. WeChat works with various partners including "phone security" apps to make sure that this background process isn't being unnecessarily killed by an overly aggressive memory manager process which would result in not receiving notifications. Outside of China, WeChat uses GCM for push notifications for Android devices. This is a common requirement for apps within China since GCM is not available, but because some apps have lower engagement they are more likely to have their notifications background process killed by aggressive memory managers.
4) WeChat for Android uses the X5 kernel, a branch of Webkit (not Chromium) and largely initially used because certain security vulnerabilities on older versions of Android system browsers (including things like SSL-vulnerabilities) made it impossible to safely deploy properly encrypted communications and transactions in webviews without making sure there a secure web rendering kernel.
iOS versions of WeChat, of course, use the default in-app Safari for webviews because it's considered secure.
5) WeChat blocks certain URLs from appearing in webviews because a) they contain malicious code and are unsafe to users or b) too many fraudsters were using certain domains to host spammy marketing content and would leverage WeChat to spam out links to these pages to make money or c) local legal requirements require blocking of certain content.
I understand that it's sometimes difficult to get good information on a product that's very popular in China, but not in Western markets. That's why it's so valuable that the YC team has spent their time to help other founders understand some of the underlying dynamics for WeChat's successful product strategy. Misinformation, therefore, is not valuable in helping the YC team achieve this goal.
What I mean, telecoms might block IM service because SMS market were rapidly replaced by IM apps. It was highly disputed around 2012. Wechat generates so much traffic that their poor 2.5G cell network can not handle signal storms.
Not only that, Wechat had VoIP capability, which requires a high level license to operate in China. The whole OTT controversy can be found here https://www.zhihu.com/question/20847225
> WeChat works with various partners including "phone security" apps to make sure that this background process isn't being unnecessarily killed
Exactly what I meant, Tencent was large enough to negotiate, while other smaller IM brands were not so lucky. Wechat's success was standing on a giant's shoulder.
> because certain security vulnerabilities on older versions of Android system browsers
But newer versions of android Wechat still refuse to include system default browser as webview even if it's more up-to-date and safer, no?
We are seeing this same replicated in India (in a different sector). India's richest businessman has started a new telco because he has 23billion$ put in his new co which provides cheap data and started the trend of lower cost per sms/data for consumers.
Being rich and influential takes you to places for sure and since Tencent was actually powerful and had their own IM like GTalk, they had the skills and the presence for this. But we have to appreciate that they were not restrictive to their cash cow, they disrupted themselves and moved forward to create/acquire wechat
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
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.
>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.
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.
I am an Indian and I don't see wechat gaining foothold in India, here, people still use whatsapp and cash.
People use paytm for paying bills, the taxman's website to pay taxes, amazon for online shopping, don't think wechat has the power/influence/differentiating product in India.
There was a push of wechat into India in 2014, but it seems to have not gone anywhere at all. The only success wechat has had outside of china is with Chinese communities, and even in this case it's marginal.
as of now, the Wechat accounts "activated" in China and the wechat accounts activated outside China have slightly different rules, to the point that you can have a 'non-chinese' account that create contents which can only be seen by 'non-chinese' accounts (and without any UI information about it).
Chinese accounts can also be 'semi-banned' where they will be able to read, but not to post video or audio anymore nor talk in groups.
"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.
> 100 times this. I can't think of a single large Western consumer software company who can actually think like that.
I'm pretty sure execs from Google/Facebook/Apple think like this, it's just you don't read about it on TechCrunch, nor do they publicize it to their investors.
But WeChat with all it's diverse functionality gets used as much as Facebook across their own portfolio.
> use the app an average of 50+ minutes, and 9 to 11 separate times, per day2. To put that in context, it is the same as the “combined time” users spend across a portfolio of Facebook apps
50% of WeChat users use it for 90 mins. Also the team really focuses on user efficiency -I.e.,, completing the task quickly and in the most efficient way
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.
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
I dunno, I'm pretty tied into the Apple ecosystem. I'm only okay with it because they're very principled on privacy, and will probably be around for a long time. But all my photos, contacts, and lots of my data are all with apple. I suspect many users have even more tied up with Google on Android.
That metric can be tricky. Balancing "one thing exceedingly well" -vs- "does lots of things" is non-trivial... For example, it is my personal opinion that Evernote has failed in this balance and now suffers because of it.
>I can't think of a single large Western consumer software company who can actually think like that
I don't feel this is particularly novel, though perhaps it is to software companies (I don't know, honestly). But this idea feels a lot like "Market Penetration" as defined in the context of the Ansoff Matrix (introduced in 1957): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansoff_Matrix
It's Marketing 101 stuff, and lots of big corporations, in old industries, employ this approach.
it's not hard, let government block all your international competitors and you will see astonishing growth in brainwashed spoon-fed population
only people amazed by wechat are those who never lived in China
next time - Democratic party would like to repeat success of CCP, they get 100% of votes! same goes for railways, all companies in liberalized European market are crying tears and wanna go learn from Chinese state monopoly railways how to win the market
what about customers? so customers have pretty much huge options, you can choose either WeChat, WeChat or Wechat, what will be your choice? kudoz to WeChat for success in such competitive market!
There were quite a few local Chinese competitors to WeChat when it originally launched. It took them almost a year to surpass Xiaomi's MiTalk user numbers.
no, not really, when they launched QQ was big and I was just surprised why some people have different status to find out it's wechat, but anyway QQ was dominating markets, everything else including Xiaomi or MSN had just leftovers
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.
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).
> 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-wecha...
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.
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.
Driven by qq number, it preserved real social network since around 2000 or earlier across basically all age groups. Its competitors in mobile age tried to break into the market with sex/business/name card/phone number/whatever else relationship graph and nothing could beat the real one. Also the main force among urban hipsters, MSN, decided to leave the game, which led its users to fall back to what they used back in college (QQ). QQ users were laughed at by urban hipsters for being too rustic. So the missing piece of the network came back.
Being part of ruling party's operation unit is something to be proud of. And business can get onto the fast lane. I have to say this is the only business model to get strong and big in that market. Of course, you have to have some foundation to get into the short list.
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?
There is ridiculous amount of competition an innovation in the Chinese app market. Every time I visit China, I'm surprised by something new the folks can do with mobile.
That innovation is starting to spill into India with Chinese company investments. A year ago, mobile payments in small shops and businesses were ubiquitous only in China, now they're proliferating in Indian cities too.
Mobile payments aren't so big in the west because they aren't so necessary. Almost every shop in the USA takes cards, the same isn't true in china or many developing markets, but everyone has a phone so let's use the camera and QR codes to get around our lack of infrastructure.
There's something else going on as well, though. People in China will now use Alipay/WeChat to pay at (for example) restaurants even though they have a bank card, and the restaurant can take bank cards. The restaurants increasingly have specialised hardware (maybe part of the same POS terminal that takes bank cards) and aren't using a smartphone to process customers' mobile payments.
True, but is that anymore convenient than card tap? Also, We are seeing QR payments happening in the states also (like at Starbucks) though I honestly don't see the point.
I've not seen contactless card payments in China. I imagine both businesses and consumers would be worried about fraud. Quick payments with a mobile wallet (where the retailer scans a dynamic QR code on your phone) feel safer, as you need to explicitly go to that screen, and you get immediate notification on any transaction on your account.
I don't doubt that there must have been quite a bit of competition before WeChat came into dominance, but is that still true today?
If WeChat is indeed so overwhelmingly dominant in people's lives in China, what strategies do the startups there use to compete with WeChat's core offerings like chat, social networking, payments, and to what degrees of success? Or do startups their just accept WeChat as a piece of infrastructure and try to innovate by building things on top of their platform instead of competing against them directly?
Good point. I said app market, but I specifically meant messaging app market.
Still a good point, just because they don't have Signal or Facebook (not that I'd trust it) doesn't mean they don't have strong competition in their own field of approved apps.
Every local company I've seen in China run themselves to an extent on WeChat.
A group chat for all employees, a group-per-team, ad-hoc groups for ad-hoc teams. It is assumed to be faster (people check more regularly) than email, less formal, more direct. And the boss can see everything (given they're in the group). Great for teams that want to look busy. I dislike it, as looking busy is different from being busy, but this is a large part of the mainland China work-ethic.
For international companies, megacorps in particular, it is not used officially, but still often gets used, with a disturbing amount of client-specific information leaking that the head-office would strictly discipline should they know, but they don't.
To edit: This was always possible before with QQ, and QQ does have phone apps, but QQ didn't have this casual business-use to the extent WeChat does today.
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
WeChat is censoring the messages, not government, they just give them order and WeChat gladly accept terms in exzchange for China monopoly and protection from international competitors, same go for Facebook, Google and million other services, which Chinese just stole and rebranded. So how exactly it's not their fault they are sleeping in bed with Chinese government?
Yeah, that's a great question. The reason they have the luxury of not caring about their user count could be that the government takes care of that issue for them by interfering with their competitors.
tl;dr Chinese assistant of a German newspaper was arrested for political signalling on WeChat.
This is a tool that has almost certainly been used to find and kill people in lower-profile cases. It's disgusting to see that HN/SV people will never care about that part of tech. This thread makes me feel terrible.
On WeChat it is really hard to see "bots". Tencent discourage them to do so. There is no supported way for connected apps to send messages automatically -- End users' confirmations are mandatory. So you'll see a more organic feeds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I lived in china for 9 years. I preferred using my unionpay card to buy things (didn't work at the wet market) and had a separate app for didi dache. You don't have to do all one things in wechat if you don't want to (accept maybe wepay), and I prefer not to for myself (wife is a different story).
After moving to California from Beijing, I can do all those things easily now online. What wechat offered instead was he Chinese preference for having everything in one place and getting around weaknesses in infrastructure. It isn't intrinsically better than what we have in the west, just different and suited for china.
"After moving to California from Beijing, I can do all those things easily now online."
I'd find it hard, in California, to do any of these things:
- Send a small payment to a friend (sure, Venmo, but most of my friends don't have Venmo)
- Buy movie tickets and choose a seat
- Pay in a restaurant without risk of my card being cloned
- Pay a water or electricity bill
- Share (real time) location with other people (yes, 'Find my friends' works if we're on iOS, but now everyone is, and it has major setup friction, and no concept of temporary sharing or groups)
- Chinese wife buys movie tickets online all the time, chooses seat if the theater has reserved seating.
- credit cards in America put fraud burden on merchants. This is very different from china (ICBC grumble) and fraudsters in the states will target Chinese using credit cards in the states accordingly.
- Chinese wife buys movie tickets online all the time, chooses seat if the theater has reserved seating.
Which app or site will let me buy a cinema ticket and choose a seat, on a mobile phone.
- credit cards in America put fraud burden on merchants. This is very different from china (ICBC grumble) and fraudsters in the states will target Chinese using credit cards in the states accordingly.
In theory, yes, it's on the merchant. In practice, it's a whole lot of hassle if your mag stripe card gets skimmed.
- online, on autopay.
Autopay isn't online. Unless you mean your computer or phone has to be on, or the autopay doesn't work.
- iPhone has had that feature for forever.
Doesn't work if even a single member of the group uses Android (or Windows or BB), which is pretty likely in a group of more than 4 people.
> Which app or site will let me buy a cinema ticket and choose a seat, on a mobile phone.
There are literally tons of apps for this. It isn't hard at all. Heck, just use fandango and be done with it, if you want.
> - credit cards in America put fraud burden on merchants. This is very different from china (ICBC grumble) and fraudsters in the states will target Chinese using credit cards in the states accordingly.
> In theory, yes, it's on the merchant. In practice, it's a whole lot of hassle if your mag stripe card gets skimmed.
Fuck ICBC. Chinese restaurants in Bellevue would pray on Microsoft China employees just because they knew they could scam their credit cards while, when reported to ICBC, would just say "prove you didn't make those charges!" Whereas if it was a non-Chinese AmEx, it wouldn't be a problem at all. Just fuck ICBC, and WePay is a Chinese solution to a Chinese problem.
> Autopay isn't online. Unless you mean your computer or phone has to be on, or the autopay doesn't work.
My gas bill, electric bill, and water bill were just paid a week ago, I didn't have to do anything. EVERY utility has an online presence, and they all support autopay. My rent is on autopay also, as is my car loan, all setup online, the only bills I pay manually are my credit card ones and whatever I get from the hospital, again, paid all online.
> Doesn't work if even a single member of the group uses Android (or Windows or BB), which is pretty likely in a group of more than 4 people.
There are plenty of location services if you don't want to use what is built into iPhone. Note that the iPhone map service works even in China, as my wife had me on it a lot when we lived in Beijing.
"There are plenty of location services if you don't want to use what is built into iPhone."
You've missed, or are ignoring, my point: in China, if I want to share my location with a bunch of friends, I can do it almost instantly. Just add them to a WeChat group and make two taps.
With a group of friends in the US, I can't, because there's no single app/service that they're all using, that has that feature.
Also:
- Card skimming isn't a uniquely "Chinese problem".)
- The fact that you're comparing mobile utility bill payment in China, with autopay in the US, suggests to me you haven't tried mobile bill payment in China.
- You are right about Fandango - it appears their mobile app has offered seat selection in many theatres for at least a couple of year.
Card skimming isn't uniquely a Chinese problem, but asshole credit card issuers who put the burden of proof in the customer rather than store are. Seriously, china has unique self-made problems that don't exist elsewhere.
Fandango has been around for many years.
We just moved to the USA from Beijing. We have pretty much everything we had back in china without wechat.
Sans the language translation, I don't find any of these activities to be a burden using available channels/providers while living in the US. I actually prefer that they're not consolidated under one roof.
The entrenched monopolies have been actively fighting allowing use of your phone for universal payment. Visa/Mastercard/et al. (rightly, in my opinion) view that as an existential threat.
This is the real reason that we can't do this on phones in the West.
The real reason we simply don't need to do it in the west, while in china you don't have any other option accept to just use cash if you want to buy from the local wet market or pay your didi driver.
`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.
- `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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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...?
> 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
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
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.
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
You clearly know more about China than I do. My concern (I'm a moderator here) is merely that you share this knowledge in a way that respects the community guidelines. If you read the pages I linked you to, it isn't hard to see how your comment violated the spirit of this site.
Inflammatory comments on divisive topics are destructive of what we care about on HN. So as a topic gets more divisive, comments need to get more civil and substantive.
It's hard to not be bitter, if you live in China for years as adult person and not some student enjoying parties and iresponsible youth years. The amount of ridiculous stuff you have to deal with every day (incompetent Chinese management in companies, unproductive Chinese coworkers, people blocking sidewalks and in general extremely selfish people anywhere you look, overcrowded subway, fighting to get to suburban bus and constant flow of people cutting the queue, toxic air, toxic food, dangerous roads, visa harassment, etc. etc.) is just unbearable after some time and eventually everyone will move away. It's not exactly country welcoming foreigners, which would explain why they have like 0.5% of population consisting of foreigners, now tell me other country with comparable population of foreigners.
But yeah, most of HN readers saw China only online and see how is it booming and stuff like that. Like look at amazing Beijing subway with many new modern nice and dandy lines, somehow everyone fail to see they are still at 50% level compared to any western city (in west you have roughly one line per 500K served population, in amazing Beijing 1mil sharing one line with no suburban trains or trams to supplement it). Same goes for their amazing HSR - omit the fact they stole German and Japanese technology, omit the fact their prices are more expensive than faster and more convenient flying in Europe and that they closed most of cheaper slower lines, so end result for people is to pay significantly more to get home.
Chinese gov propaganda department must be smiling reading comments on this website.
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).