China’s biggest app fights potential rivals by blocking them
Both WeChat and Facebook take an aggressive stance against any competition

Do you remember a social app called Tsu? Yeah, neither do we. And there might be one reason behind that: Facebook. In 2015, Facebook blocked all links to Tsu’s website and even links to articles about the platform.
This week, China’s biggest social app WeChat did exactly the same -- only this time it took down three apps at once.
WeChat, the app that does everything
WeChat’s parent company Tencent denies that it’s blocking the apps for being potential competitors, saying instead that it’s for unsafe content and user complaints.

Blocking apps entirely might seem unusual, or perhaps limited to smaller start-ups. But in China, it’s common enough that WeChat, the country’s dominant messaging app, won’t let you share links from Taobao, one of the country’s biggest online shopping platforms… but it will let you go directly from WeChat to JD.com.