The Many Ways of WeChat

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

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).

Just like Facebook is just for keeping a contact list of friends and family.

Sarcasm aside, wechat is a full social network.

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.

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.