[est]

Some secret weapons this article did not mention

1. Allen Zhang (Founder of WeChat) was the author of once popular desktop email client: Foxmail, and later Tencent acquired it, Zhang refactored a new version of web mail on mail.qq.com.

In order to support Microsoft Exchange protocol, Zhang and his team reversed engineered it, this was later the foundation of Wechat's binary protocol design, in Zhang's words, it's magnitudes faster and robust than your XMPP copycat. It's designed to work well in extremely poor signal coverage area with only GPRS 2G online access.

2. Wechant literally stole telecom's SMS cake. Tencent put lots of effort striking deals with telecoms, ordinary IM startups might simply be blocked or QoS'd to death.

3. Tecent also pushed very hard to third-party Android ROM publishers to pre-install Wechat. It's like 2-5 RMB per new user acquisition and the app can not be deleted unless rooted. Tecent also negotiated to made sure Wechat app always stays in memory and can not be easily killed so push messages can be received, Be noted, because Google was fully stripped in all legit Android phones in China, there's no Google Play or GCM service, some other IM competitors are struggling to have basic message receiving capabilities.

4. Wechat is a lock-in mega app. Little known fact is it got a Tecent Browser (X5) fully builtin, it's an outdated Chromium build and its behavior is kinda headache to debug compared to othe mobile browsers like Chrome or Mobile Safari, lots of customised JS bridges and restrictions.

The evil part is that every link you view in wechat must renders exclusively in X5. E.g. if you open a youtube page, it renders in webview in wechat, if you have youtube app installed and wanna view the URL link in app, you have to click for the wechat menu, open the webpage in system browser, so your waste your data bandwidth for the second time and opens the exact webpage, and click "Open in App".

This ensures engagement times.

5. Wechat blocks competitor URLs for obvious reasons, e.g. *.taobao.com domain since day 1 because "the link looks malicious and may harm your device". It force users to choose Tencent equivalents(JingDong).

[downandout]

Just goes to show you....execution is all that matters. If you can force your crappy app onto hundreds of millions of devices through your deal-making capabilities, you'll have the same success that a viral sensation would have.

[lawik]

Even if the team is lean the article made the product seem very heavy, all-in-one. I have a hard time seeing success with that in the west these days. Feature-filled communities was definitely a big thing once.

I get that a partnered article won't cover these kinds of practices. However it does leave a bad taste in my mouth to see this unapologetic praise in the article for what seems to be a monolithic monopoly play.

[rahimnathwani]

"the article made the product seem very heavy, all-in-one"

This is what amazes me. WeChat has lots and lots of features, but doesn't feel heavy at all. The messaging UI is both clean (no unnecessary clutter; snappy) and feature-rich (can send text, start a voice chat, send money, send a voice message). Some of the other features that you might not use every day (like paying utility bills, topping up mobile) are in a separate 'Wallet' section which actually looks a bit like the Alipay app.

[anuh]

It is not a monopoly play by any means. Alipay is a big competitor of TencentPay and bigger than WeChatPay. Also though the app supports so many features and services, it has a really simple UI. The user has to go hunt the various features and they don't send too many push notifications either. You have to really know the ins and outs of it to know where to access some of the features.

[frik]

WeChat actually feels very light and has a way better UI than WhatsApp and Facebook Chat - though they rather slowly now copy it from WeChat. Crazy times, as now US has to copy the Chinese competition which is now like 2-3 years ahead.

[Markoff]

it's ahead only if you think those markets are comparable, people outside China don't desire this functinality since they have many other good options, people in China has horrible options so WeChat looks actually pretty good to them and they use additional functionality on top of chat/wall

I lived in China since beginning of growth of WeChat and could see it in front of my eyes, in beginning it was very simple messenger and they kept growing userbase and adding more and more functionality, though you end up being locked in in their ecosystem, as was mentioned taobao links are blocked and those options under Wallet section are mostly not the best value, so I pretty much avoided those added functionality. Heck I rather top up electricity through Alipay, since it was easier than WeChat or some companies didn't have contracts with them.

anyway back to your comment, you say they are ahead of Whatsapp and Facebook, but please tell me in what exactly they are ahead, in selling tickets, paying utilities and sending money through messenger app? do people outside China desire this? if people don't desire it, they are not ahead, people in west have fast wire transfers, can pay pretty much anywhere in card so there is no necessity for such functionality, I could go on and on if you tell me in what area they are exactly ahead since I lived in China for years and I live in west so I can compare

Yes, WeChat is extremely convenient for life in China. Is it convenient and good app for life outside China? Hell no, I don't want and I don't need those features from Messenger, since we don't have blocked internet I can visit whatever website I want and use their services without state protectionism.

[eratins]

Strange that you're being downvoted as I found this to be true too.

[shouldbworking]

Wow. I was impressed but now I'm kind of glad we don't have that kind of monopoly in the US. Google is in the same arena but we have several strong competitors for most of their products at least.

[swang75]

Many portions of this reply are categorically and maliciously false including: 2) "Wechant literally stole telecom's SMS cake. Tencent put lots of effort striking deals with telecoms, ordinary IM startups might simply be blocked or QoS'd to death."

Amongst WeChat's many local competitors were equivalent messaging apps including China Mobile's "Feixin" messaging app and China Telecom/Netease's "Yixin". Both competitors, as officially published apps from the telcos themselves, had the ability to leverage free SMS messaging, an ability that WeChat did not have access to. WeChat is considered a tangential competitor to the telcos.

WeChat doesn't block or QoS other IM products. That would be illegal and, frankly, a PR fiasco in addition to a great way to lose user trust.

3) It's against WeChat values to push mobile phone makers, distributors, or ROM publishers to preinstall WeChat for pay. In addition to being against WeChat values, it's also a big hassle as preinstalls require careful version management. Due to the popularity of the app and the relatively high cost of data for many low-end users, many of these distributors have voluntarily preinstalled certain popular apps including WeChat as a convenience to their consumers. WeChat did not "negotiate" to keep WeChat app in memory -- I'm not sure where you're information comes from. For users within China where Google Cloud Messaging is not an option, a background process for Android continues running to receive push notifications from a notifications server. WeChat works with various partners including "phone security" apps to make sure that this background process isn't being unnecessarily killed by an overly aggressive memory manager process which would result in not receiving notifications. Outside of China, WeChat uses GCM for push notifications for Android devices. This is a common requirement for apps within China since GCM is not available, but because some apps have lower engagement they are more likely to have their notifications background process killed by aggressive memory managers.

4) WeChat for Android uses the X5 kernel, a branch of Webkit (not Chromium) and largely initially used because certain security vulnerabilities on older versions of Android system browsers (including things like SSL-vulnerabilities) made it impossible to safely deploy properly encrypted communications and transactions in webviews without making sure there a secure web rendering kernel.

iOS versions of WeChat, of course, use the default in-app Safari for webviews because it's considered secure.

5) WeChat blocks certain URLs from appearing in webviews because a) they contain malicious code and are unsafe to users or b) too many fraudsters were using certain domains to host spammy marketing content and would leverage WeChat to spam out links to these pages to make money or c) local legal requirements require blocking of certain content.

I understand that it's sometimes difficult to get good information on a product that's very popular in China, but not in Western markets. That's why it's so valuable that the YC team has spent their time to help other founders understand some of the underlying dynamics for WeChat's successful product strategy. Misinformation, therefore, is not valuable in helping the YC team achieve this goal.

[est]

> WeChat doesn't block or QoS other IM products

What I mean, telecoms might block IM service because SMS market were rapidly replaced by IM apps. It was highly disputed around 2012. Wechat generates so much traffic that their poor 2.5G cell network can not handle signal storms.

Not only that, Wechat had VoIP capability, which requires a high level license to operate in China. The whole OTT controversy can be found here https://www.zhihu.com/question/20847225

> WeChat works with various partners including "phone security" apps to make sure that this background process isn't being unnecessarily killed

Exactly what I meant, Tencent was large enough to negotiate, while other smaller IM brands were not so lucky. Wechat's success was standing on a giant's shoulder.

> because certain security vulnerabilities on older versions of Android system browsers

But newer versions of android Wechat still refuse to include system default browser as webview even if it's more up-to-date and safer, no?

[anuh]

Relationships with carriers is not new. WhatsApp negotiated a lot of carrier relationships in India early on.https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/10/whatsapps...

[thewhitetulip]

We are seeing this same replicated in India (in a different sector). India's richest businessman has started a new telco because he has 23billion$ put in his new co which provides cheap data and started the trend of lower cost per sms/data for consumers.

Being rich and influential takes you to places for sure and since Tencent was actually powerful and had their own IM like GTalk, they had the skills and the presence for this. But we have to appreciate that they were not restrictive to their cash cow, they disrupted themselves and moved forward to create/acquire wechat