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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

The general theory that I have is that the Great Migration brought millions of chinese citizens to the city, who neither had bank accounts, credit cards, or phones. The pathway to connecting with friends, businesses, and money or even finding jobs immediately became "Get WeChat and a phone." This lead to a reenforcement cycle with businesses, that they had to offer services on WeChat to get new customers and combined with the injections of cash due to the overall modernization of China, it allowed WeChat to grow even more. And of course, add in the local government blocking foreign competitors.

Thus a large portion of some individuals where basically introduced to modern computing via phones and via chat and businesses started advertising "Chat-first" as well.

I've seen roughly the same in India with WhatsApp, but with a lot less discrete functionality.

Feel free to correct my theory though, it's mostly outside observation...

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The lower end you go, the more popular QQ is over WeChat, at least that was the case a few years ago (I'm sure WeChat is over dominating now). WeChat started to become popular firmly among the middle and upper classes as far as I could tell.

Thats a fair point that asks 'Why did WeChat become the upper/middle city class chat app of choice over QQ and others' and I'd love for someone to weigh in there...

QQ didn't require a smartphone, while WeChat did. You can basically see WeChat adoption as being correlated with smartphone adoption (and the middle class adopted them first). Also, young people are more likely to use QQ than WeChat because QQ is anonymous and focuses on gaming, they are much less interested in WeChat's location-based and commerce features.

Note that QQ and WeChat are both Tencent, they aren't meant to be in direct competition with each other.

Well I'd like to point out that 微信 (WeChat) does require a personal bank card in order for monies to be transferred/stored on a persons account.

I think the two main contenders for payment apps are Wexin and Alipay (支付宝). Both are vastly more popular than QQ these days.

WeChat and its dominance in its early days to a number of factors. Primarily in its infancy this is: good advertising, uniqueness compared to QQ (think MySpace -> FB), solid interface and voice memos. Voice memos were a killer feature that is massively more popular than in England (my experience) and I assume most of the West. Later on payments were added which enables anyone to have a business (receive money for services) and huge convenience for shopping or sending money to friends.

Alipay at the moment is less focused on social media like WeChat and more on interlinking services (Cinema, Shopping, Mobile payments, Utilities, Lifestyle etc). Also there's a massive advertisement campaign driving its use; currently each 24 hours users can scan a red envelope (红包) QR code an receive credit on their balance. I've receive $4~5 dollars a day, with an average of $1. Thats a free breakfast for most people.

Typing Chinese is significantly harder than typing English. Thus, voice memos offer a superior user experience. Building in Voice Memos as a first class feature into the messaging UI was what got WeChat its initial push.

I don’t think that’s true with predictive text

It is. Even proficient Chinese typists are significantly slower than English typists.

That really isn't true, even with a pinyin IME. More so if are talking about spoken Chinese (used for chat) vs. more colloquial written Chinese. Prediction really does speed things up (on my old nokia back in 2002 I used to be able to text faster in Chinese than in English).

Have you seen people type Chinese in a T9 keyboard? My wife grew up in China and typed using that method and faster than her English typing.

Not really true IMO, because you can even use initialisms to type entire phrases and sentences in pinyin and omit most of the characters.

Let's say you wanted to write 我很喜欢吃汉堡 (I really like eating hamburgers), you can get away with just typing 'w h x h ch han bao' and predictive text gets you the entire sentence.

Chinese text is well optimized towards readability and information density, at the expense of taking a lot of work to manually write, but that calculus completely changes if your writing system is smart enough.

But that assumes a lot fluency with pinyin and the prediction system. A lot of people are missing one or both.

Typing Chinese isn't that hard. I can do it easily even with my very, very basic Chinese.

I think voice messaging took off in China mainly because they don't have the same cultural barriers to voice messaging that we do.

Personally I believe this to be the correct answer. I've lived in 4 countries in Europe and China and only in the latter is it perfectly acceptable to be loud and noisy on public transport (and in general everywhere).

I love China, but I do believe the culture of apathy towards others that are not family have helped this. 没办法！

The most interesting to me how it leveled the playing field.

It's not considered awkward/strange to just chat with any business (restaurant, online shop) owner before deciding to spend your money. People just love comparing prices for everything and doing "background checks" all the time.

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