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. 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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