On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat • Hacker News Board

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#91

Post by dilemma » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 12:16 AM UTC

nebabyte wrote: post #33

apexalpha wrote: post #28

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 store…

> 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…

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.).

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#92

Post by lewisl9029 » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 12:41 AM UTC

dilemma wrote: post #86

lewisl9029 wrote: post #80

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 w…

>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…

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.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#93

Post by dangrover » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 1:11 AM UTC

Former WeChat PM here. Good analysis.

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.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#94

Post by LiweiZ » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 1:26 AM UTC

abalone wrote: post #73

> 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 f…

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.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#95

Post by nickonline » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 1:34 AM UTC

EnFinlay wrote: post #83

mbesto wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would disagree with this. Facebook definitely has no problem creating an endless stream of content with >5% ad density.

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

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#96

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 2:44 AM UTC

lewisl9029 wrote: post #80

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 w…

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.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#97

Post by est » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 2:46 AM UTC

Some secret weapons this article did not mention

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).

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#98

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 2:48 AM UTC

anuh wrote: post #85

abalone wrote: post #73

> 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 f…

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…

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.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#99

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 2:49 AM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #22

daveguy wrote: post #7

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 th…

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. The Western markets are quite…

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.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#100

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 2:55 AM UTC

apexalpha wrote: post #36

nebabyte wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I have lived in China for 6 months, and from the top of my head: - Voice/Text Chat - (Video) calling - Payment service (like Apple or Android pay) - Buy movie tickets - Buy plane tickets - Send money via Chat. - Splitt the bills. - Pay the government (utility companies etc) directly from WeChat - Find people nearby (like tinder? But less so than TanTan) - Chat on desktop (like whatsapp web, but native client) - Log o…

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.