They can come out but you cannot go in. As in the article wechat but no visa. That is the problem. The world will have only 1 winner if this continue.
What Would a WeChat Replacement Need?
31–40 of 90 posts
Re: What Would a WeChat Replacement Need?
#32Surprised to see no Payments mentioned at all, which makes the post makes very little sense.
WeChat is also, and by large, a financial service. Payment and transfer is happening all the time on this platform, and to replace that is a magnitude difficult than just replace the chat.
Re: What Would a WeChat Replacement Need?
#33People seem to have the idea that WeChat is some sort of amazing application -- it's not. In fact the only reason why it has the market share it does in China is simply because all competitors are blocked. Some of WeChat's real pain points are: - No backing up your messages to the cloud like WhatsApp or having them loaded from the server like Facebook Messenger. Moving all your messages from one phone to another is q…
> simply because all competitors are blocked.
International competitors may be. Till this day, I didn't see something come close to what WeChat is offering in China.
WeChat is like Chrome, it is so big and ubiquitous in China, it can dictate standard.
The online backup of messages itself is a pain point I agree, but local transfer is possible, though a bit cumbersome.
Re: What Would a WeChat Replacement Need?
#34LINE, whatsapp etc are catching up wechat. Instead of cloning wechat, an alternative would be developing a proxy between IM apps, i.e. all wechat messages can be forwarded to whatsapp so it become part of whatsapp, well, kind of, it's painful to use whatsapp, LINE, telegram, wechat at the same time, need something to "unite" them so we can go to one place and do it all.
Chat vendors have no incentive to support standards based interoperability. They all want to leverage network effects to maximize switching costs and keep users confined to their walled gardens. The only way to break this would probably be government mandates.
Re: What Would a WeChat Replacement Need?
#35LINE, whatsapp etc are catching up wechat. Instead of cloning wechat, an alternative would be developing a proxy between IM apps, i.e. all wechat messages can be forwarded to whatsapp so it become part of whatsapp, well, kind of, it's painful to use whatsapp, LINE, telegram, wechat at the same time, need something to "unite" them so we can go to one place and do it all.
Wasn't XMPP supposed to do something like that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Connecting_to_other_proto...
XMPP does it, Matrix does it: https://matrix.org/bridges/
...honestly most of the open chat protocols end up with bridges since it's easier to do there than with the proprietary ones. WhatsApp for example will ban you if they see you trying to connect with a third-party client; using the Matrix bridge actually involves running Android with the official client in a VM.
Re: What Would a WeChat Replacement Need?
#36What is WeChat?
I think you meant to type this into your browsers search bar.
Re: What Would a WeChat Replacement Need?
#37https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3dl32LaOls&feature=youtu.be... 10 seconds, then
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw2nfdNRAn0
China Bad SV Good SV Make New WeChat SV Win Yay
https://archive-media-1.nyafuu.org/vp/thumb/1525/64/15256481...
Re: What Would a WeChat Replacement Need?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have more info about being killed by the SEC? I'm curious about this because I was looking forward to a Western Competitor to WeChat.
Sure: * TON blog: https://ton-telegram.net/news/telegram-and-sec-asked-to-spee... * nice summary of how US securities law affected TON (from October 2019): https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/10/13/sec-blocks-t... * verdict in the case: https://www.reuters.com/article/legal-us-otc-telegram/sec-wi... Some investors are considering launching independent blockchain based on open-sourced TON technology. But even if…
Great summary.
I'm very biased (active developer in Telegram ecosystem), but I'm having a hard time imagining Durov letting this SEC case stop him.
Even if he has to return all the funds, I'm confident he will still push forward and bring TON and Grams into production.
It's less of a straight path, but Durov's smart and stubborn - two valuable traits in this circumstace.
Re: What Would a WeChat Replacement Need?
#39He missed a point (and probably an important one for wechat's home market): CCP approval. /snark
Definitely. Literally half of the features in the "What do we want?" section would get his replacement banned in the PRC, which is one of the few markets where WeChat is popular enough to even be something to replace.
And much more. Not going to through it all in detail, and there are probably many things I don’t know about WeChat since I’m not a heavy user living in mainland China.
The team definitely needs to get the experience of being behind the great firewall. Try using a VPN there to watch YouTube, try using a locally purchased cell phone without access to Google Play or the Apple app store. Try bashing PRC government policies in WeChat.
Only then will they see how tightly things are locked down. It's not like they're the only ones to have this idea, so why doesn't it exist? Oh, because it's really difficult and even dangerous with the current police state that controls the communications.
Re: What Would a WeChat Replacement Need?
#40I think people that feel WeChat is simply a social network don't understand WeChat. Though the article doesn't say this, the comments here and popular opinion generally think that. From my time visiting China I'm not sure it's possible to live, in the urban areas, without WeChat. Payments are basically all through WeChat; I found places that didn't take Visa/Mastercard (or even know what those were, although that may…
The article doesn't really mention blockchain other than 2 times quickly, it seems like everyone in this comment section seems to believe that though as if they said you MUST use blockchain at every step of building something like this.
The article demands decentralisation of infrastructure, which if you want to facilitate payments like Wechat does which is a large and key component of the platform, requires some sort of consensus mechanism.
Doesn't necessarily need to be a blockchain, but something similar in spirit, and this quickly falls apart because WeChat does a billion+ transactions per day, that's about tens of thousands per second and there's no decentralised, secure solution for this.