from Hacker News

The Many Ways of WeChat

by edithsan on 11/26/15, 6:45 PM with 28 comments

  • by dangrover on 11/27/15, 8:21 AM

    I'm biased working on the thing, but speaking purely a user, I feel WeChat gives us a peek of the phone OS we'll see in 3 years.

    The recent "messaging apps will eat everything" spin is burying the lede. What's happening, broadly, is that in some places (esp. Asia), OS/phone vendors are losing in the early stages of a war between platform (iOS, Android) and meta-platform (things like WeChat, LINE, FB).

    Yes, its central function is nominally an SMS replacement, but as a meta-platform it plasters over a bunch of gaps in the OS level. The central UI is a common, semi-hierarchical stream for notifications/news/messages with a consistent set of controls for deprioritizing/blocking things. Then you have services like payment, authentication, and social graph. A lightweight Instapaper/Evernote shared by all my apps. Handling for things like QR codes which western-designed OSes don't do on a system level. Universal search for chat and non-chat content alike. A health/activity data feature for the various Bluetooth gizmos my friends and I use. Then, on top of that, you have tons of light-weight third-party services/apps which, while the experience can shoddier than a native app, for 50% of apps is far more convenient than actually downloading and updating so many 100MB+ apps on my phone and spotting their various red badges in a sea of icons/groups.

    In effect, it's a nascent vision of an OS oriented around a thread-based UI paradigm instead of an app-based UI paradigm. Some day, I'm certain some kind of sensible central "inbox" will replace my home/lock screen (as well as the push notification tray).

  • by patrickaljord on 11/27/15, 12:20 PM

    Just a small reminder that the reason WeChat (and Baidu) are so popular in China is because Facebook, Twitter, Skype and Google are blocked there. It's easier to grab a local market when free competition is made illegal. I'd be more impressed if they were forced to compete with the rest of the world and in fact, they are doing pretty badly in most of the rest of the world where they are forced to compete.

  • by ignoramous on 11/27/15, 10:02 AM

    In India, Whatsapp almost enjoys the same status as WeChat. Only that Whatsapp isn't really doing what WeChat is, but it could very well do that too. Then again, it raises question about how much should an app really do... someone posted a blog to HN that complained how Evernote is trying to do too many things, and is getting the note-taking part wrong, which is core to its product.

    Whatsapp is touted as a SMS replacement. But calling it that is downplaying it prowess in handling multimedia content. Almost everyone I know use it as an "email replacement" instead (after the advent of "100 people groups," I must admit). Think about that for a moment-- a replacement to email! As Whatsapp continues to get better at handling more and more content, it will start replacing the "browser" on the phone. That's upto Whatsapp of course to make it more powerful and realise that vision, flawed or not.

    Look at how powerful the browsers have become. Tomorrow, if Whatsapp starts offering in-app embedded browser experience, I am pretty sure the dynamics will change again.

    Oh, and e-commerce happens over Whatsapp as well. So, its kind of a craiglist replacement too.

  • by dheera on 11/27/15, 1:25 PM

    My biggest gripe about WeChat is that it doesn't support multiple logins. It's tied down to 1 mobile device and there is no desktop or web-based client that can login using a simple username and password. I switch devices very often and very much prefer that information flow with me as I switch from place to place, device to device, transparent to others around me, and not require me be attached to a single piece of hardware. This is something that Facebook chat does very well. Unfortunately, my entire social circle uses WeChat so I don't exactly have a choice.

  • by surrender on 11/27/15, 1:56 PM

    Wechat is way more than just a SMS replacement. You can pretty much run your life on it. In China, you can book hotels, buy train tickets, pretty much everything on it as well.

    What I really like about it is you can create different circles of people (kinda of what Google+ tried to popularize and failed) and communicate with all of them at once. A lot of people are part of circles with their grade school friends, with all their relatives (distant cousins too), etc. etc.

  • by gdiocarez on 11/27/15, 9:00 AM

    I thought it was just for meeting up or online chat.

  • by gamesbrainiac on 11/27/15, 9:26 AM

    A lot of messaging applications originating out of Asia seem to have a similar set of traits. They have minimal data costs, they have both audio and video (although Line's audio is terrible) and they also are building their own payment systems.

    At one point, this recipe is going to get old.

  • by jpatokal on 11/27/15, 7:51 AM

    Egads, what a linkbaity title. I prefer a16z's survey of the WeChat world: http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/

  • by a-dub on 11/27/15, 9:21 AM

    So basically it's the Yahoo business model, on mobile, for Asia.