[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.