People seem to have the idea that WeChat is some sort of amazing application -- it's not. In fact the only reason why it has the market share it does in China is simply because all competitors are blocked.
Some of WeChat's real pain points are: - No backing up your messages to the cloud like WhatsApp or having them loaded from the server like Facebook Messenger. Moving all your messages from one phone to another is quite the ordeal .
- Complete disregard for platform standards. Specifically notifications on Android and Windows 10 are atrocious. Both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have notifications that are well integrated with the especially the Android notification system, WeChat notifications however are not.
-A lot of nice to have chat features are either non existent or have just recently been introduced. For example a poor implementation of quoting a previous message was just introduced like a month ago, and there are no reactions for specific messages -- and no timeline for implementing them either.
WeChat does have quite a bit of different "apps" built into it, but not really more convenient to use than the separate apps are. It's mainly just a casualty of China's lack of anti monopoly legislation.On my phone I have Alipay (the other half of china's online payment duopoly) installed together with WeChat, and almost always use it for payment (It's pretty much accepted everywhere WeChat is)
It would need to be introduced in a single large city in 2011 and spread from there with the implicit backing of the federal government.
It would not need a blockchain. There is no reason whatsoever for basing this on a blockchain.
He missed a point (and probably an important one for wechat's home market): CCP approval.
/snark
I would be interested in a we hat replacement, but as soon as I read ethereum I thought: nah. Cryptocurrencies are just not compatible with mainstream consumption. Why? Because I get paid in euros. And you might get paid in dollars. And a wechat user gets paid in Yuan. But nobody gets paid in ethereum.
Seems like a silly article. Even if they had feature parity today, very few people would use the replacement because their friends aren't using it, their family aren't using it, the shops they want to buy from aren't using it, the people they meet aren't using it...
WeChat is many things all in a single app:
- A payments platform called WeChat Pay (think PayPal, Venmo, Apply Pay, Android Pay all combined)
- A consumer messenger platform with voice and video chat (think Facebook Messenger + WhatsApp)
- A friends newsfeed called Moments with audio and video support, external links but visibility of
content is timeboxed in days, weeks or months (think Facebook News Feed with a touch of Instagram Stories)
- An e-commerce store platform called WeChat Store (think Shopify)
- A business platform called "Official Accounts" with many features:
* A business / bot messaging platform (think Facebook Messenger for Business)
* An advertising platform
* A content distribution platform, primarily through Official Account Subscription Accounts (like blogs, news, think Medium). WeChat offers this through "Channels", "Top Stories", "Official Accounts" and "Mini Programs".
* WeChat Official Accounts Service Accounts can create "Mini Programs" which are rich integrations and tightly integrate with your linked WeChat Payments account, for example:
1. Didi Chuxing for Ridesharing (Uber)
2. Mobike for Bike Rental (Lime Bike etc)
3. Meituan Dianping for e-commerce and food delivery
4. Douban, Yishenghuo, Yoopay etc for Event / Concert Tickets (think Eventbrite, Ticketmaster)
Surprised to see no Payments mentioned at all, which makes the post makes very little sense.
WeChat is also, and by large, a financial service. Payment and transfer is happening all the time on this platform, and to replace that is a magnitude difficult than just replace the chat.
You will probably never come up with the right answer for this question because the question itself is wrong. You never build a "WeChat replacement" by building a WeChat replacement. You just end up with a knockoff if you start from this question.
Spoiler alert: the answer is Blockchain according to the post.
Site is running slow, here's an archive: https://archive.is/w1HMt
This might be onpopular, but I don't think you should aim for "no censorship" and "no way for authority to police people". As we're seeing in today's social media, unfettered communication is not something you might want. Think of all the misinformation, trolling and conspiracy theories going on in our western social media _despite_ very heavy efforts to contain them by Facebook, Google and Twitter. This is biting us hard in our current crisis, where people are going as far as burning down 5G masts, thinking they are heros fighting against the government-ordered spread of Covid-19 [0]. The older I get, the more I start to think that the police fulfills a very fundamental function in our society, no matter how free that society thinks it is. And we likely do want some policing in our virtual worlds as well. Whatever the next social media is going to be (it seems to me that this is what you're trying to plan out here), it should include some sort of moderation option of some case.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/technology/coronavirus-5g...
You don’t just build a product like WeChat or Facebook. You grow your product to that level.
What WeChat/Facebook are today is highly path-dependent hence you don’t get to replicate that, and your intelligence and ambition probably won’t let you either.
Stop try to replace them, build sth different and help people in a new and better way. With that, you might be able to transcend them.
Telegram was on a good path to become WeChat replacement, with its Telegram Open Network blockchain an Gram cryptocurrency coming and plans to add wide range of services including decentralized storage, web pages and payment channels. But now it looks that part has been killed by SEC, so the niche is still unoccupied.
WeChat's dominance in Chinese social media is mainly due to its close relationship with CCP. It would be a different story if the market was open to west tech companies. Talking about a censorship resistant social media in China is completely a waste of time.
This technology has a lot of potential. I have played around with Status for a while and it has a real potential to surpass the safety functionalities of Telegram and Signal.
LINE, whatsapp etc are catching up wechat.
Instead of cloning wechat, an alternative would be developing a proxy between IM apps, i.e. all wechat messages can be forwarded to whatsapp so it become part of whatsapp, well, kind of, it's painful to use whatsapp, LINE, telegram, wechat at the same time, need something to "unite" them so we can go to one place and do it all.
1. Government approval (the ability to record and snoop on all conversations) 2. Wechat would have to lose government approval.
WeChat is a not a chat app. It's a micro universe. Imagine WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Paypal, Uber, etc. and an entire app platform all integrated into a single app. That's WeChat.
This is what facebook wanted to do when they launched their APIa long time ago, never came to pass. WeChat did it. Its a whole operating system in itself.
I only skim read this, but it feels like you could swap "WeChat" for any messaging system or social networking site
Chinese govt (firewall) and people of China
Feature #1: Censorship circumvention.
Support from Chinese Communist Party
What is WeChat?
The only answer is Replace CCP.
They can come out but you cannot go in. As in the article wechat but no visa. That is the problem. The world will have only 1 winner if this continue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3dl32LaOls&feature=youtu.be... 10 seconds, then
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw2nfdNRAn0
China Bad SV Good SV Make New WeChat SV Win Yay
https://archive-media-1.nyafuu.org/vp/thumb/1525/64/15256481...
I think people that feel WeChat is simply a social network don't understand WeChat. Though the article doesn't say this, the comments here and popular opinion generally think that.
From my time visiting China I'm not sure it's possible to live, in the urban areas, without WeChat. Payments are basically all through WeChat; I found places that didn't take Visa/Mastercard (or even know what those were, although that may have just been my pronunciation).
So the answer to this article is simple:
- For China: CCP approval
- For America/Europe: WeChat would never happen, unless there was severe monopolisation that allowed a company to roll something like WeChat out successfully, or the federal government / national governments mandated it
The article discusses how a WeChat replacement may be done using blockchain, not what a WeChat replacement needs to be successful (as the title would imply), or what may be the most technically viable way of doing it.