[eva1984]

TL;DR, the mini program is basically WeChat's own chrome web store, web app with proprietary API to interact with WeChat.

Didn't know why this is hyped so much, and there is nothing revolutionary about this. It makes the Chinese internet even more becoming WeChat's own walled garden.

[lhr0909]

If you think about similar products on the market (fb messenger, WhatsApp, even Line or Kakao Talk in Japan/Korea), this is quite unheard of, because WeChat is taking up everyone's time on the phone. Other apps just simply cannot divide a user's attention out of WeChat the app, on a smartphone.

And just because of that, most of the businesses and companies start to live off of wechat's user base and features. For example, there are subscription accounts where you get subscribed articles regularly so you don't need to build a news app anymore for content, and individual content producers can also publish just as easily, so the spiral gets deeper and deeper into the wechat system. And when payment started to come around on WeChat in 2014 (iirc), even Alipay is taking a hit, because now you literally can just keep WeChat open on your phone.

I think that, if you build an IM product and suddenly become the only app people ever use, this is just amazing.

[felixding]

> because WeChat is taking up everyone's time on the phone

Well, not me. I'm Chinese and I hate hate hate WeChat. It's a cluttered, privacy intrusive app and a very close eco system.

WeChat became this popular is by no means because of the app per se, but because of it is made and heavily promoted by Tencent.

Before WeChat we had much more elegant and simple apps like Talkbox and WhatsApp.

[Markoff]

there is no such thing as internet in China, correct word here for North Korea 2.0 is intranet, it's like calling something with 20% milk fat content butter

[robjan]

There is a difference between China and North Korea's internet access. North Korea works on a "whitelist" basis, whereas China operates on a "blacklist" basis. The Chinese people have access to the majority of the internet but, for cultural and language reasons, are not interested in most Western websites. Yes, many western social media and news sites are blocked but they are not "the internet" and if you consider them as such then the west has exactly the same problem as the one you have just described.

[Markoff]

please, i was living in China more than 5 years, Chinese government won't let me to video chat with my family, every single app was blocked unless i wanted my family to install Chinese spyware on their devices, even the Skype which is supposed to be not blocked is essentially slowed down to speed marking it useless for video

pretty much every photo sharing website is blocked

Chinese "internet" is essentially using white list, it's easier to say what's not blocked than list everything which is blocked

[robjan]

I travel into the mainland regularly and use video and voice chat on WhatsApp all the time without any problems. Things are changing.

[nneonneo]

FWIW, Apple FaceTime worked fine for me three years ago (video calling between China and the US).

[PerfectDlite]

> Yes, many western social media and news sites are blocked but they are not "the internet"

Says who?

> and if you consider them as such then the west has exactly the same problem as the one you have just described.

What? So, "the evil west" considers social media and news sites "not internet" and blocks access to them?

[arjo129]

Local sites are considerably faster than foreign sites which don't work if they use https.