[sfifs]

There is ridiculous amount of competition an innovation in the Chinese app market. Every time I visit China, I'm surprised by something new the folks can do with mobile.

That innovation is starting to spill into​ India with Chinese company investments. A year ago, mobile payments in small shops and businesses were ubiquitous only in China, now they're proliferating in Indian cities too.

The Western markets are quite tame in comparison.

[seanmcdirmid]

Mobile payments aren't so big in the west because they aren't so necessary. Almost every shop in the USA takes cards, the same isn't true in china or many developing markets, but everyone has a phone so let's use the camera and QR codes to get around our lack of infrastructure.

[rahimnathwani]

There's something else going on as well, though. People in China will now use Alipay/WeChat to pay at (for example) restaurants even though they have a bank card, and the restaurant can take bank cards. The restaurants increasingly have specialised hardware (maybe part of the same POS terminal that takes bank cards) and aren't using a smartphone to process customers' mobile payments.

[seanmcdirmid]

True, but is that anymore convenient than card tap? Also, We are seeing QR payments happening in the states also (like at Starbucks) though I honestly don't see the point.

[rahimnathwani]

I've not seen contactless card payments in China. I imagine both businesses and consumers would be worried about fraud. Quick payments with a mobile wallet (where the retailer scans a dynamic QR code on your phone) feel safer, as you need to explicitly go to that screen, and you get immediate notification on any transaction on your account.

[lewisl9029]

I don't doubt that there must have been quite a bit of competition before WeChat came into dominance, but is that still true today?

If WeChat is indeed so overwhelmingly dominant in people's lives in China, what strategies do the startups there use to compete with WeChat's core offerings like chat, social networking, payments, and to what degrees of success? Or do startups their just accept WeChat as a piece of infrastructure and try to innovate by building things on top of their platform instead of competing against them directly?

[ganfortran]

Wechat controls social connection. It is like you cannot compete with Facebook on social as well here. So, you have to cooperate with them.

[daveguy]

Good point. I said app market, but I specifically meant messaging app market.

Still a good point, just because they don't have Signal or Facebook (not that I'd trust it) doesn't mean they don't have strong competition in their own field of approved apps.

[anuh]

There was a ton of competition even with mobile messaging before WeChat launched. And the competitors were other Chinese apps.