WeChat

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app developed by Tencent.

Some of the most popular social media websites, with over 100 million registered users, include Facebook (and its associated Facebook Messenger), YouTube, WeChat, Instagram, QQ, QZone, Weibo, Twitter, Tumblr, Telegram, Baidu Tieba, LinkedIn, LINE, Snapchat, Pinterest, Viber and VK, reddit and more.

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app developed by Tencent.

Some examples of popular messaging apps include WhatsApp, China's WeChat and QQ Messenger, Viber, Line, Snapchat, Korea's KakaoTalk, Google Hangouts, Blackberry Messenger, Signal, Telegram, and Vietnam's Zalo.

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app developed by Tencent.

The original version of the app was created by Zhang Xiaolong and named "Weixin" by Ma Huateng, CEO of Tencent and launched in 2011.

He is known for leading the developments of WeChat and Foxmail.

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app developed by Tencent.

On 21 January 2011, Tencent launched Weixin, a social media app.

WeChat's character stickers, such as Tuzki, resemble and compete with those of LINE, a Korean messaging application.

Nowadays Tuzki has extended his emoticon popularity to different major messaging app platforms including WeChat, KakaoTalk, Facebook and VNG Corporation's Zalo.

Due to its popularity, user activity on WeChat is used for mass surveillance in China.

WeChat has been described as China's "app for everything" and a "super app" because of its wide range of functions.

China's e-commerce industry took off in 2009, marked by the growth of internet giants Tencent and Alibaba – purveyors of products such as WeChat and Tmall – that have become ubiquitous in contemporary Chinese life.

In 2014 for Chinese New Year, WeChat introduced a feature for distributing virtual red envelopes, modelled after the Chinese tradition of exchanging packets of money among friends and family members during holidays.

During the Lunar New Year holiday in 2014, the mobile instant messaging service WeChat introduced the ability to distribute virtual red envelopes of money to contacts and groups via its mobile payment platform.

The original version of the app was created by Zhang Xiaolong and named "Weixin" by Ma Huateng, CEO of Tencent and launched in 2011.

After two months, one team presented an app for text messaging and group chat – WeChat – which launched in January 2011.

WeChat also censors politically sensitive topics in China.

It can also integrate with other social networking services such as Facebook and Tencent QQ.

By comparison, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp (two other competitive international messaging services better known in the West) had about one billion monthly active users in 2016 but did not offer most of the other services available on WeChat.

Those, as of 2019, were services like iMessage (estimated 1.3 billion active users ), WeChat (1 billion active users ), Viber (260 million active users ), Telegram (200 million users ) and LINE (187 million active users ).

It can also integrate with other social networking services such as Facebook and Tencent QQ.

Although users receive immediate notification of the transaction, the WeChat Pay system is not an instant payment instrument, because the funds transfer between counterparts is not immediate.

In digital wallet based payment systems like Paytm, PayPal, Apple Pay, AliPay, WeChat Pay etc. users receive immediate notification of the transaction, but funds are transferred at best in the next business day.

Other competitors, Baidu Wallet and Sina Weibo, also launched similar features.

According to a BBC News report, the decreasing number of users since 2014 can be attributed both to the crackdown by the Chinese government on the use of aliases to create accounts and to the rising threat from competitor WeChat.

WeChat Pay's main competitor in China and the market leader in online payments is Alibaba Group's Alipay.

Alipay is conceptually similar to Apple Pay, WeChat Pay and PayPal because it overlays traditional card payment methods.

In 2015, Apple published a list of the top 25 most popular apps infected with the XcodeGhost malware, confirming earlier reports that version 6.2.5 of WeChat for iOS was infected with it.

The firm also identified a new variant of the malware and dubbed it XcodeGhost S; among the apps that were infected were the popular messaging app WeChat and a Netease app Music 163.

Comparing with the traditional E-business like JD.com and Alibaba, WeChat Business has large range of influence and profits with less input and lower threshold, which attracts loads of people to join in WeChat business.

In October 2013, the Alibaba's chairman Jack Ma announced that the Alibaba Group would no longer use Tencent's messaging application WeChat, and would henceforth promote its own messaging application and service, Laiwang.

Comparing with the traditional E-business like JD.com and Alibaba, WeChat Business has large range of influence and profits with less input and lower threshold, which attracts loads of people to join in WeChat business.

Jingdong has ~170 million e-commerce users, and Tencent has the largest WeChat and mobile QQ users in China.

In the 2010s, more people started to use messaging apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Signal and Line rather than instant messaging like AIM.

Despite Apple's review process, WeChat and other infected apps were approved and distributed through the App Store.

A security firm later published lists of infected apps, including a China-only version of Angry Birds 2, CamCard, Lifesmart, TinyDeal.com, and WeChat.

* Comparison of instant messaging clients

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app developed by Tencent.

It was first released in 2011, and became one of the world's largest standalone mobile apps in 2018, with over 1 billion monthly active users.