[dangrover]

Former WeChat PM here. Good analysis.

But annoyed that mot western coverage of the app focuses on the breadth of features/platform stuff and belies the many ways that it's an extremely solid messaging app compared to many.

The choices made in the fundamentals (adding friends, creating groups, notifications) are all super well thought out. People using it will use it for communicating with strangers and conducting business, something you don't see in any messaging app in the US. The core messaging features are versatile and ultilitarian. And it's chock full of power user features like tags, notes, pinning threads, etc. The core team had spent 10 years working on email clients and services before embarking on it and it shows. This is the foundation the rest was built on.

[thewhitetulip]

Your WeChat experience would be interesting, we can learn so much from it, clearly the app took over the Chinese ecosystem, so you guys did a lot of things right (which nobody has able to replicate).

I would love to talk to you about it!

[anuh]

That's a fair point! I was also amazed into how much thought went into when to notify and really protecting user experience