WeChat isn’t cool enough for kids anymore so China’s viral king is planning a competitor

WeChat’s dominance is both a trigger to create contenders and the reason they never succeed

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A singing room pits 6 people against each other, and whoever finishes the most verses wins. (Picture: Yinyu)

Published: 8:00pm, 10 Dec 2018Updated: 8:47am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

WeChat has an absolute stranglehold on smartphones in China. But now many people are betting that there is room for other social apps.

Bytedance, the maker of the popular short video app TikTok and China’s most popular news app Toutiao, is now developing a new messaging app named Flipchat, according to Chinese media reports.

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We have yet to receive a comment from Bytedance about the app, and there isn’t any detail about it from the Chinese reports.

But the timing of it sure makes sense. Bytedance has irked rivals with its network of addictive content apps, and has been expanding to other territories like ecommerce. And some see a weakness to WeChat: With over 1 billion users, most of them in a country with 1.4 billion people, there isn’t all that much room for Tencent’s app to grow. And with everyone on it, WeChat isn’t cool anymore -- some teenagers think it’s “for old people”.

Yinyu, for example, has been one of the most popular apps among young people lately. Literally meaning “voice encounter”, the app matches users for a karaoke contest -- challenging users in a “chat” room (singing room?) to compete to sing the next verse displayed by the app. Launched in September, the app has been among the top five of the social networking category on China’s iOS app store, and is currently ranking the 12th of all free apps.