Profile tencent 900b wechat for free#

And when people meet in China, they do not exchange phone numbers or even paper business cards anymore, but WeChat contacts.īy law, Chinese internet companies have to hand over user data if requested by the police. WeChat is the way people talk to their friends and family. But WeChat is the way people communicate for business, not email. WeChat does not have a monopoly on mobile payments - Alibaba, the “Amazon of China”, has a payment service that is equally widely used. It’s nearly impossible to get by without using WeChat in China these days: Even though stores are supposed to accept cash, many don’t carry change and don’t want to do business with you if you can’t pay with your phone. And whatever WeChat can’t natively do, it can do through its third-party development partnerships, whereby others can build micro apps that launch within wechat itself, thus making wechat almost equivalent to an operating system instead of just an app. Think of WeChat as one app that includes Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Expedia, Venmo, Paypal, short-form podcasts, and food delivery. As an array of tech experts rightfully concluded from a Facebook post Zuckerberg wrote in March, WeChat is exactly what the American king of social media would like Facebook to be. They send roughly 38 billion messages every day. WeChat now has more than 1 billion monthly active users globally. Instead of remaining just a messaging app or building entirely separate apps for separate functions, Tencent rapidly rolled out entire suites of features within WeChat that kept users coming back for more, and more importantly, kept competitors from emerging: Video and audio calls, Facebook-type news and friend feed, payments, connection to ride-hailing services so you could get a car without leaving the app, travel and ecommerce services…

What was different about it, though, was that it quickly established itself as the first major Chinese website or app that was not obviously cloning the features of an existing American player.

Profile tencent 900b wechat for free#

Initially, it was not that different from WhatsApp: You could send text and voice messages, for free if using a Wi-Fi connection, thus avoiding mobile texting charges. If there is one thing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wishes he could create, and will never be able to acquire or replicate, it’s WeChat - China’s super-app, which has changed the way people use their phones, and disrupted the social media industry.Ĭhinese technology giant Tencent - whose first business was desktop computer messaging - launched WeChat (微信 wēixìn) in 2011.