WeChat, the app that does everything

WeChat is omnipresent in China. With more than 1 billion monthly active users, the Tencent app lets people chat, pay bills, play games, shop, and access government services -- without ever leaving WeChat.

Reading Time:3 minutes

Published: 5:59pm, 2 Oct 2018Updated: 8:08am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Think of all the things you can do with your smartphone today. Whether it’s booking a train ticket, finding a hotel, paying bills, messaging a friend, sharing photos, ordering food, and so much more, almost all of these things happen in separate apps -- but in China, you can do all of this inside a single one: WeChat.

WeChat is both an app and so much more than that. It somehow combines Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Uber, Venmo, and even the App Store itself in one little package.

WeChat is so powerful that China is the one place where people are more likely to freely switch between iOS and Android. In the rest of the world, it’s hard to switch between the two because you’re locked into the ecosystem of apps and services exclusive to each platform. In China, you don’t have that problem: Everything is inside WeChat, and WeChat is the same whether you’re using an iPhone or a Xiaomi handset.

SWISS ARMY KNIFE

WeChat, known as Weixin in China, was the brainchild of Allen Zhang, a programmer whose startup was bought by Tencent. Back then, Tencent already had a successful desktop instant messaging service called QQ, but was looking to build something different for the growing number of smartphone users. Zhang and his small team won an internal shoot-out between two competing ideas inside Tencent, and their product was released in 2011 as WeChat.

So how do you navigate an app that does everything? When you open the app, there are four main tabs at the bottom: Chats, Contacts, Discover and and Me. The first two are for instant messaging -- but it’s the last two that make WeChat special.

Under the Discover tab, there is an Instagram-like feature called Moments that lets you share photos with your friends. “Shake” allows you to jiggle your phone to find new friends nearby -- sort of like Tinder with a twist. You can also use it to identify a song that’s playing around you, just like Shazam.