[tluyben2]

Bit offtopic;

For me it shows more, to western apps, how you build an app that always works... with wechat I can do sync and async voice calls, chat and photo sending with any connection, even if it is very slow or intermittend. No western app I have tried, including the actual phone app, does that as well as wechat. I can call, on 2g crappy China Mobile to colleagues in the EU where Skype and Whatsapp will not even connect or send anything over.

Payments are nice when they do not take card here in China (as I do not have a CUP card).

But that, for me it is secondary: the always connected and stable is better. And that works on my mountain in Spain too :)

Edit: for people that always have fast internet, apps that are totally unusable with bad connections are: skype, slack, office 365 (google docs is still workable). OK apps are Facebook messenger, google hangouts, google docs and whatsapp. And so far the only that just works is Wechat.

[lhopki01]

One thing you need to be careful about is comparing a service in China with the service outside of China. For example Skype in China because of the monitoring put on it disconnects all the time where it would be fine outside of China. Services like WeChat have an inbuilt advantage in that their connectivity isn't as interfered with in the same way that western apps are.

[tluyben2]

Skype doesn't work in the west (I live 5 months per year in Spain and the rest I work in UK/NL/China/HK/Aus; it is no different in other places hence I like wechat which works well everywhere) either on bad connections; it won't connect or will be very slow/unreliable at sending even small pieces of text, let alone images.

[aantix]

It works for me. It's stable and down-regulates the stream quality really well with a bad connection.

[jasonlingx]

It's horrible and I often have to reboot my computer whilst using it.

[aantix]

Why would you have to reboot your computer if an app is failing? I don't think I've had to do this since running Windows 2000..

[jasonlingx]

Exactly...

It actually starts saying it is unable to connect to my speakers and microphone...

[tluyben2]

The fact you can still talk means you have a far far better connection than I am trying to describe here.

[yyhhsj0521]

I agree.. My Skype is always unhappy to send images for me. Whereever I am.

[joosters]

I totally agree with your comment about apps unusable with poor connections. I've been away camping for a few days, the campsite was in a forest with a weak 2G connection; web pages would load slowly, so the link did work, but most apps gave up and timed out instead of using the connection. A chat app like Google Hangouts should be able to send and receive tiny text messages just fine over 2G, but apparently app developers put in too short timeouts.

[tluyben2]

Yep. Apps like Hotels.com app and BA apps time out while the sites work fine on 2G. App devs think everyone has big data pipes; I almost never do. At which point Wechat is great.

[runn1ng]

I have had a great experience with Telegram app with poor connections.

No wonder it's so popular in Asia, Russia and Middle East.

[tluyben2]

Ah never tried it. I will now :)

[runn1ng]

I am not sure how is it compared to WeChat. I have no friends from mainland China :/

Compared to LINE - originally Japanes app, popular in these regions - it's a godsend. LINE is terrible.

[yyhhsj0521]

How can you get your contacts migrate to Telegram?

[runn1ng]

Hard :)

The network effect is hard to overcome. I migrated to it just because a lot of people in my company used it.

You can try to persuade just the friends that you talk to the most, and if they will like it, let them share it further. Or not, if they don't.

[spacehunt]

> I can call, on 2g crappy China Mobile to colleagues in the EU where Skype and Whatsapp will not even connect or send anything over

Are you sure this is not due to the effects of both 1) the GFW and 2) the atrocious traffic shaping Chinese ISPs apply to international connections?

Not sure about Skype, but Whatsapp always works for me even down to 2G, outside of China.

[tluyben2]

No because it also works outside China (I live in the mountains of Spain and do a lot of work while walking through said mountains; around a corner suddenly you lose internet and the next it's back; wechat copes with that fine even in a call, whatsapp not so much last I tried); if you compare;

- go on 2g with 1 bar (really bad/intermitted 2g) - upload a photo to a friend on wechat & whatsapp => whatsapp is significantly worse, not to mention Skype which is horrendous

Same goes for audio snippets or voice calling via whatsapp compared to wechat.

In and outside China.

But yes, for messages (text) whatsapp & wechat both work reliably. Skype mixes up and loses messages randomly, even text only ones. Not to mention Slack and Hipchat; those are just funny if you don't have perfect internet.

Disclaimer; I use wechat a lot more for work than whatsapp; whatsapp is more for social contacts which means they are far less critical most of the time.

[spacehunt]

Ah you're talking about voice, which I rarely do (as I find voice messages especially annoying, but that's offtopic).

I found Wechat to be a resource hog on my phone, and the few times I've tried it, most recently less than a month ago, I immediately uninstalled it.

[tluyben2]

I find voice calling very annoying and I used to find voice messages annoying; but now that in Wechat I can just have those voice messages, relisten to them in chat context and transcribe them easily (you can do all of that from whatsapp also of course).

Whatsapp and Wechat both behave well on my phone (Android 5something on a modern Huawei); Skype doesn't.