Tencent’s resurrected social app is Facebook, Instagram and Tinder wrapped into one

The Chinese giant behind WeChat is quietly trialling a revamped version of Pengyou as it faces competition from ByteDance and others for teenage users

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You have to submit a few materials like a company letter or a company ID to verify your identity. (Picture: Pengyou)

Josh Ye

Published: 10:00am, 12 Dec 2019Updated: 10:00am, 12 Dec 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

WeChat is still the undisputed king of social in China, but lately its owner Tencent has been trialling a string of new apps. One curious offering is Pengyou (“friends”), a previously discontinued app that the company is now giving a second life.

The experiment comes at an interesting time for Tencent. Eight years since it launched WeChat, the highly popular app is struggling to entice younger users. Just 15% of people born after 2000 post on WeChat every day. Compare that with ByteDance’s Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok: More than half of its users were born after 1995.

Meanwhile, for older users, WeChat has increasingly turned into a default tool for facilitating business connections and consuming media content. Recently, the hashtag #WeChatHasBecomeTheDefaultOfficeApp went viral on Weibo, with comments from tens of thousands of frustrated users complaining that WeChat is becoming too work-oriented and isn’t personal enough.

WeChat, the app that does everything

Days later, Tencent quietly started sending out invite codes to Pengyou. Armed with my own code, I took a look at what Tencent’s new social network is offering.

The similarity between Pengyou and Instagram is quite obvious. (Picture: Pengyou)

The layout is similar to Instagram, with the same square pictures and buttons for liking and commenting. There are also a variety of photo filters and video trimming tools.

But whereas Instagram and WeChat both lump posts from all your connections into a single feed, Pengyou divides them into three tabs: Friends, colleagues, and people living in the same city.

Interestingly, the app also asks users to upload personal credentials like diplomas or a company letter for verification. The real name approach is supposedly designed to stop profit-seeking businesses from getting onto the platform while bringing some transparency to app to better help people select who they want to interact with.