[aurareturn]

You're overreaching. Can the Chinese government force WeChat to provide data to the government? Yes. But WeChat is a private product built by a private company. In addition, WeChat has a ton of competitors inside China as well. These competitors can overtake WeChat. The government isn't preventing competitors from competing directly with WeChat.

WeChat is literally just Tencent. I'm staying at a hotel next to Tencent office right now in Shenzen. There aren't any military people working here. Just engineers.

Read my post within this chain for why I think WeChat has a lot of power when it comes to getting Apple to create features it needs.