History of WeChat App

WeChat is an incredibly popular mobile app with over 1 billion monthly active users. So many people are using WeChat and it remains such a popular application with a regular user count many mobile app developers wish they could have. What is their secret to having such a successful mobile application? Well, there is an extensive history of business connections, development, and various events in one of the most populous nations on the planet that allowed WeChat to be able to grow to prominence. This story will hopefully explain the development of WeChat and how it became such a powerhouse - and how it became very controversial in the United States and several other Western nations due to some of the reasons for its success...

WeChat is an app that is interconnected with the Chinese company Tencent with the Tencent Guangzhou Research center starting development on it back in October of 2010. The original version was mostly created by a man named Allen Zhang, a Chinese computer programmer who has had a history on working on Tencent's major software applications, and launched in 2011. A year later, the application caught the eye of the Chinese government and soon, it began supporting the production of WeChat as part of its 12th five-year plan (a five-year social and economic development initiative for supporting rapid economic growth, development, industrial policies, and corporate finance). With this help from the Chinese government and active support from a major company, WeChat was able to grow to one hundred million users by 2012. That year, 'WeChat' also officially got its name since before this period, the app was still called by the name it had during testing, 'Weixin'. By 2016, the application had eight hundred eighty-nine million active users before growing to over a billion users in 2019.

WeChat also became popular due to the variety of services it offers compared to the other social media applications competing with it. For one, WeChat started life as an instant messaging application that allowed people to communicate with each other in a variety of ways. With WeChat, you can send text messages, voice messages, and broadcast messages (where you can send a single message to a bunch of other people at the same time). You can also use it to share videos with your friends and also host conferences & video calls, making it useful for having video calls with your friends and having business meetings with the same application. WeChat also acts like the PayPal of China since it includes a service called WeChat Pay. It was released on August 5th of 2013 and it allows WeChat users to make mobile payments & online transactions using their phones. This system is really important for WeChat's relevance in China where 83% of all financial payments are done with mobile phones. In fact, more than 90% of these mobile payments are run through either Alipay or through WeChat Pay, which would basically be like in Facebook or the Signal SMS application were also the biggest mobile payment apps on top of their original functions. WeChat also has WeChat Channels, which is basically a short video platform that acts like a competitor to TikTok with over 200 million users as of June 2021. For China, WeChat is basically a central all-in-one application that is almost central to basic financial life and having a decent social life.

Why is this important to know? It probably isn't... unless you are planning to do business in China. If you want to do business in China, working with WeChat is probably should be one of your number one priorities. Without them, you are basically cutting yourself out of the Chinese market entirely.