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Comment by santoshalper | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like a world where AOL won and we all accessed the internet through keywords and paid everything through AOL, or very similar to France's old Minitel, except for mobile.

Having everything in one app is interesting if only because it offers some powerful integration opportunities, but otherwise this sounds like a proto-Internet for a developing economy.

$5 says they evolve past this in the next 3-5 years and their app ecosystem looks a lot more like ours.

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Or the mobile messaging ecosystem in US will look a lot more like wechat in 3-5 years. China can be ahead in some areas.

If china is ahead in this, then humanity might as well pack it in. China's sandbox model works well when you've got a few hundred million uneducated peasants, but an educated populous (Which china is having more success stopping than I care to admit) wants diversity; It wants options, differing opinions, choices that cater to them, not to what people want to offer them.

It's a platform, it could certainly evolve to cater for different options.

China has an educated urban population about equivalent in size to the entire population of the US, and they're all using WeChat. My wife is a Nurse, has a 2:1 degree and although born in China has lived and worked in the UK since 2000 and she uses WeChat all the time, as do our kids. Educated non-techies don't want diversity, they want functionality and community.

Yup. My English sister has been using it because she gets better quality voice than Skype. Maybe Wechat is winning because it's the better product.

Please spellcheck "educated populous" before claiming another country doesn't have one.

More likely that the US is ahead. The GFW heavily props local companies. Chinese internet companies are much less market-tested than US companies.

Please let us know how the bet turns out.

Consider what Facebook tries to with its Messenger app, I bet $5 that in 3-5 years, US will get its own ASIAN messaging app~

EDIT: I think you should compare Wechat to Chrome + its app store, only that here it is not a web browser(in fact Wechat do have a embeded browser) but a chating app.

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