How WeChat faded into the silence in India | Hacker News Reader

How WeChat faded into the silence in India

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181 pointsHalfRebel45 comments

WeChat seems to have never tried very hard to adapt their app for international users.

The English interface is reasonably well-tested (many of my Chinese friends use it to practice their English), but other languages might cause overflowing UI elements because the translated text is longer than accounted for.

That problem also affects the English version in some places e.g. when adding a contact, the short introduction you can write to explain who you are and why you're adding them has a length limit. It's probably enough for Chinese text, but requires being very concise when using English.

Many features are designed to prevent virality. Comments on a friend's timeline ("moments") are only visible to your shared friends. Small chat groups can be bootstrapped by scanning a QR code or by typing a shared passcode simultaneously, but beyond 100 users newcomers need to be invited by a member first. Comments on public articles are hand-picked by the author and only the author can reply directly. There used to be a feature displaying trending articles, but it seems to have been removed.

Those limitations prevent regime-critical opinions from spreading too quickly, but they also mean that only users with a large social circle on WeChat are going to stick with the app.

The article mentions women being harassed via the "people nearby" feature. My impression is that it is mostly used by men looking for hookups and by "women" who are prostitutes or pretend to be prostitutes to scam those men.

Successfully entering a market without already-strong ties to China would have required making large changes about the way their app works.

The anti-virality features are designed to limit the spreading anti government messages. Larger groups require one leader with verified id. He is responsible for the messages posted in group when government want someone to be sued

even the english interface isn't great. they haven't fully translated/globalized all menus, dialogs, and features. i often get chinese dialog options popping up that were arrived at via actions in english.

as a chat app, wechat isn't even that great. you have to manually select the high quality option for pictures and then manually download pictures. whatsapp does this automatically in the background. there is no backup feature like whatsapp that i am aware of. signing up and verifying is also a little confusing. wechat is generally worse than whatsapp in slow/bad connection scenarios.

in my opinion, wechat will never be popular outside of china because it is basically a chinese app os inside your phone. wechat's power only becomes apparent when actually in china where basically anything you do from payments to booking travel to riding the metro can be done from wechat.

> WeChat seems to have never tried very hard to adapt their app for international users.

Seems fairly bad from the developer side, from a look at their documentation. Some of the instructions seem to direct you to use a Chinese UI: https://open.wechat.com/cgi-bin/newreadtemplate?t=overseas_o...

And there's some licensing requirements that, while translated, seem to be Chinese business licenses?

> other languages might cause overflowing UI elements because the translated text is longer than accounted for.

Ignoring the China context, it's good to take char count (possibly correcting for char width) for all strings in all translations and doing a edge-testing localization. QAs will know how to walk through the app without understandable text but they'll be able to spot overflows easily then.

The people nearby and friend invite requirements being in problem in India but not in China can be explained by:

> QQ messenger – already had over 750 million monthly active users by the time WeChat launched. A user could port her entire QQ social graph to WeChat by just logging in with her QQ ID.

It sounds like WeChat is really just a renamed QQ of sorts. So any adoption comparison of messenging app uptake in other countries with that of WeChat in China should use the QQ launch of 1999, which makes WeChat's rise to ubiquity far less impressive.

More impressive is that, while this was going on, the original QQ quickly pivoted the actual mobile version of QQ in competition with WeChat.

Mobile QQ had more users than WeChat until 2015, and even today, there remain parts of the country + user segments that strongly prefer QQ on mobile.

It's impressive that QQ managed to pivot. MS Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and AIM all have baked in social networks and failed to pivot.

This is one of the things I find fascinating about far east Asian internet versus western internet UX design. I remember looking at Taobao a few years prior and was taken aback by the page density. I would love to read a book covering the differences in UX design due to having a more informational dense scripting system.

My partner works in web design for China and she is consistently frustrated by the foreign colleagues suggesting very plain designs, while the customer requires dozens of bells and whistles on the main page, like various indicators, scrolling pictures, sidebars with dozens of links and news, and so on.

So the misunderstanding is mutual.

It's interesting how ubiquitous whatsapp has become in India that it has become a verb. My parents and other older generation folks often say "whatsapp this to me".

WhatsApp seems to have similar widespread market adoption in Brasil[1] too.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/whatsapp-i...

Orkut too was much popular in India & Brazil, looks like these both countries have similar users.

Nah, it's just that WhatsApp is massively popular worldwide, except for China and the US.

From my limited experience, I know in India you can get a lot of SMS spam. I wonder if people migrated to whatsapp for that reason?

I think one of the bigger reasons was something the article touches upon - image sharing. Internet connections can often be sketchy, and Whatsapps compressed image sharing often ran circles around its competitors.

The other reason was the identity to phone number mapping and the ease of setting up communities with those identities.

Yet another reason was you didn't need to separately pay for a mobile data package and a SMS package anymore - WhatsApp replaced SMSes and it fit frugally into the data plan.

I know that in my circles these played a big role. Reason 1 was especially significant for my parents/older relatives since my conversations with them are not text heavy (maybe them getting used to a device to type in for casual communication is a factor) - we often share images, family photos - and WhatsApp killed it in this niche use-case.

I think the reasons are :

1. It's free ( if you already have Internet on your phone )

2. It's very easy to use and fast

3. The multimedia experience is better than MMS

4. Group chats

5. Network effects ( Some companies provide customer service through WhatsApp, your friends may already hang out in certain WhatsApp groups etc )

Unfortunately many people have to mute WhatsApp messages because they may be in a family group, getting too many messages and it may be considered rude to leave

TL:DR WeChat was too big for phones back few years ago when many people didn't have space to spare and data was expensive and slow. WhatsApp compressed files so they loaded quicker and you could keep more of them.

Then in 2016, Tencent for some reason invested in Hike Messenger when it was already in trouble. Hike was created by the son of a telecom guy. Sorta if the son of Verizon's CEO created an instant messenger app and got investment and support from his dad and the company.

The last time I tried Wechat it slurped into the 300MB range after installation (apk + app data) - I have 3 contacts there.

Comparison:

    WhatsApp apk 39.86MB (2018-10)

I have a few leftover installers for ancient windows, eg. XP, for the fun and memories.

    1.9M Apr 18  2009 SkypeSetup.exe (2.6 I think)
    8.7M Dec 15  2007 trillian-v3.1.9.0.exe

I so badly want the ancient skype back.

Ancient Skype pioneered the concept of having a shim setup and downloading the actual setup.

That's... valid, though I seem to recall that particular version was skype itself. I need to install that on an XP without internet now to verify.

I don't think that is the case.

Skype 2.6 was about 15MB, the 2MB is the web installer which pulls in more data. See[1]. Still, a far cry from 300MB -- and does about as much.

[1]https://skype.en.downloadastro.com/old_versions/

And the ancient Skype even worked better than the new one... that's the sad part.

Obviously you need to reduce your contact list!

It's not only about it being too big. I'd also question what it's doing and why does it need all that space if it is just a texting app. The answer of course is that it aims to be so much more, but couple that with it being from China and it's probably a given that it's doing some spying.

It's so big because it comes with an embedded copy of the QQ browser, which is used to render almost all content. (On Android, on iOS they might have to use WebKit?)

So it's bloated for pretty much the same reason Electron apps are bloated.

WeChat is meant to be the only real app on your phone. They are essentially aiming to replace your phone, the way that AOL tried to be "the internet". So they don't really care if the app occupies your whole phone -- that's the point.

Can anyone tell us if WeChat's inability to flex to the Indian market was intentional and "arrogant" or was it unintentional? They call them "blind spots" for a reason.

hike is dead, everyone uses whatsapp, the kids use snapchat, and people use telegram for large groups / interests.

I primarily use iMessage (most friends and all of my family uses it), but I'm also on WhatsApp so I am available to people having to use Android etc. I also joined Telegram but it doesn't appear to have a lot of adoption where I am. In addition I occasionally get messages on FB Messenger but it also seems to be losing traction.

Obligatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/1810/

I'm not sure what your message is supposed to be saying / bringing to the table.

Also, what a very localised generalisation. The article is about how the dominant app in China is faring in India. Other countries have different usages.

Eg near both india and china Line and fb messenger are dominating Thailand while Whatsapp has trouble there (lots of people have it, nobody uses it), snapchat is still hisptery/rare, wechat is limited to chinese expats and nobody has even heard of telegram.

Just my personal observations. I thought we were talking about use of chat apps in India so of course it makes sense for me to talk local. Another personal observation; the tibetan community in india uses wechat, snapchat is very popular among the youth, so is instagram. FB is for old people. The important thing to take away from the article was that "India is divided into three consumer segments: the first 100 million, mainly the urban or affluent Indians and are the main targets of indulgent e-commerce brands; the second 100 million classified as the aspiring class; and the last a little over a billion — three segments he calls the splurgers, strivers and survivors." and wechat appealed to none

Personal anecdotes have value in situations where data is sparse. Often one has to extrapolate from a small number of use cases when developing a new product. I found his comment valuable.

> people use telegram for large groups / interests. and bots, i have a couple of whatsapp based groups that have a telegram channel/bot.

Do you have data to back this up?

No population data but every single person I know in the 40-65 age range spends hours on whatsapp, annoying everyone younger with their forwards and bullshit morning wishes. Everyone keeps asking me to join telegram so that they can add me to these groups too large for whatsapp. And I'm too old to know anything about what the kids use these days.

Perhaps backdooring by the Chinese government?

To the downvoter: I'm sorry but this is not speculation but a statement of fact. All Chinese communication systems are state mandated to be backdoored, and given the industry, state officials get an automatic share in the company and a seat on the board. It's not too say the CIA/nsa/FBI hasn't tried to do the same in America, but it's legal to provide secure software here, whereas in China it's illegal.

What supprised me is that you need to design your app around the fact that the entire country has a stalker problem. That really annoys me.

I think that point in the original article isnt 100% accurate.

The ‘People Nearby’ feature can be turned off in the settings, but you also have to click into it to use it - it’s by no means automatic (ie. you sign into Wechat and suddenly it start getting random harassing messages). Your visibility expires after a few minutes.

It’s never been used as a feature to add a contact - in China is was mostly used for hookups in the early days, and now if you’re in a big city it’s mostly prostitutes and/or people trying to sell products.

Chinese women using that feature would absolutely have received ‘stalking’ messages, but that’s basically the same as women receive on any kind of dating or hookup app.

The only difference I can see (speculating somewhat about Indian users) is that Chinese users have always seemed quite happy to use an app for their work/business/friends/school that also includes basically sex-on-demand type features. I know whenever criticisms of Wechat are brought up in the West, a lot of people focus on the fact that how could you recommend this app to your dad or gran or kids, knowing that it has this weird dark and nefarious corner in it.

So I dont think it’s fair to say India has a stalking problem based on this - more like, Wechat has a weird feature that enables potential sexual harassment that Chinese users don’t seem to care about.

> Your visibility expires after a few minutes.

Last I checked, it was 6 hours. You can clear it manually, but that might not be obvious to a first-time user who clicked through the explanatory pop-up without reading. (Or maybe that was added later.)

This is set differently based on account region. International users have a higher expiry time.

After reading the article, much more assertive on DO NOT USE Whatsapp. Hate being sent messages from strangers. Even I have someone on my contact, probably it is someone I somehow know from work or long-time-no-see met-once-person, why do you you want to have them on your social chatting app?

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