WeChat

WeChat

WeChat Running on Apple iOS 8
Developer(s)	Tencent
Initial release	January 21, 2011 (2011-01-21)
Stable release	iOS 6.3.8 (December 11, 2015 (2015-12-11)[1][2]) [±] OS X 1.2.2 (August 18, 2015 (2015-08-18)[3]) [±] Android 6.3.5 (June 3, 2015 (2015-06-03)[4]) [±] Windows Phone 6.0.4 (June 26, 2015 (2015-06-26)[5]) [±] Symbian V3 4.2 (February 4, 2013 (2013-02-04)[6]) [±] Symbian V5 4.2 (January 17, 2013 (2013-01-17)[7]) [±] BlackBerry OS 3.6 (May 30, 2014 (2014-05-30)[8]) [±] BlackBerry 10 1.0.1.16 (July 30, 2013 (2013-07-30)[8]) [±] Windows 1.1 (May 6, 2015 (2015-05-06)[9]) [±]
Operating system	iOS,OS X, Android, Windows Phone, Symbian, BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10, Windows
Available in	English, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Malay, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Russian, Hindi, Turkish, Myanmar
Type	Instant messaging client
Licence	Proprietary
Website	www.wechat.com (International) weixin.qq.com (China)

WeChat (Chinese: 微信; pinyin:  Wēixìn; literally: "micro message") is a mobile text and voice messaging communication service developed by Tencent in China, first released in January 2011.^[10] It is one of the largest standalone messaging apps by monthly active users.^[11]

The app is available on Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Symbian phones. Web-based OS X^[12] and Windows^[13] clients also exist; these however require the user to have the app installed on a supported mobile phone for authentication, and neither message roaming nor 'Moments' are provided.^[14] As of December 2015, WeChat has over a billion created accounts, 650 million active users; with 70 million outside of China.^[15]

WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, sharing of photographs and videos, and location sharing.^[16] It can exchange contacts with people nearby via Bluetooth, as well as providing various features for contacting people at random if desired (if these are open to it), next to integration with social networking services such as those run by Facebook and Tencent QQ.^[17] Photographs may also be embellished with filters and captions, and a machine translation service is available.

History

WeChat began as a project at Tencent Guangzhou Research and Project center in October 2010.^[18] The original version of the app, "Weixin", was invented by Xiaolong Zhang, and named by Ma Huateng, Tencent CEO.^[19]

In April 2012, Weixin was re-branded as WeChat for the international market.^[20]

On 12 August 2015, Tencent revealed WeChat's Monthly Active Users metrics to be 600 million,^[21] a quick growth over the previously released number of 549 million Monthly Active Users released only 5 months earlier.^[22]

Features

Instant Messaging

WeChat supports different ways of instant message, including text message, voice message, walkie talkie and stickers. Users can send previously saved or live pictures and videos, namecards of other users, coupons, lucky money packages, or current GPS location with friends either individually or in a group chat. WeChat's character stickers, such as Tuzki, resemble and compete with those of LINE.^[23]

Public Accounts

WeChat supports users to register as a public account, which enables them to push feeds to subscribers, interact with subscribers and provide them with services. By the end of 2014, the number of Wechat public accounts had reached 8 million.^[24] Public accounts of organizations can apply for verified, official, public accounts. Public accounts can be used as a platform for services such as hospital pre-registrations,^[25] visa renewal^[26] or credit card service.^[27]

Moments

WeChat supports users to post image and text, share music (associated with QQ Music) and article, as well as comment and "like" in the Moments. Only the friends from the users' contact will be able to view their Moments contents and comments. The Moments can be also linked to Facebook and Twitter account, which can automatically post Moments content directly to these two platforms. ^[28]

WeChat Payment

WeChat supports payment and money transfer, which allows their users to peer-to-peer transfer and electronic bill payment.^[29] In addition to China, the payment service is offered in parts of Southeast Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania.^[30] WeChat Payment also competes with Alipay.^[31]

City Services

WeChat has launched the City Services feature in 27 cities across China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.^[32] City Services include booking doctor appointments, paying electricity fees or traffic fines, and booking transportation.^[33]

Friend finding

WeChat allows people to add friends by a variety of methods, including searching by username or phone number, adding from phone or email contacts, playing a "message in a bottle" game, or viewing nearby people who are also using the same service. In 2015 Wechat added a "friend radar" function.^[34]

Censorship

Global Censorship

Starting January 9, 2013 reports arose that Chinese language searches even outside China were being keyword filtered and then blocked. This occurred both on incoming traffic to China from foreign countries but also exclusively between foreign parties. (The service had already censored its communications within China.) In the international example of blocking, a message was displayed on users' screens reading "The message "南方周末" your message contains restricted words. Please check it again." These are the simplified Chinese characters for a Guangzhou-based paper called Southern Weekly (or, alternatively, Southern Weekend). The next day Tencent released a statement addressing the issue saying "A small number of WeChat international users were not able to send certain messages due to a technical glitch this Thursday. Immediate actions have been taken to rectify it. We apologize for any inconvenience it has caused to our users. We will continue to improve the product features and technological support to provide a better user experience." WeChat has plans to build two different platforms to avoid this problem in the future; one for Chinese mainlanders and one for the rest of the world. The problem exists because WeChat's servers are currently all located in China and thus subjected to its censorship rules.^[35][36][37]

Restricting Sharing Websites in "Moments"

On Dec 12, 2014, WeChat announced that according to "related regulations", domains of the web pages that want to get shared in WeChat Moments need to get an ICP license by Dec 31, 2014 to avoid being restricted by WeChat.^[38]

Security concerns

WeChat operates from China under Chinese law, which includes strong censorship provisions and interception protocols.^[39] WeChat contains the ability to access the text messages and contact books of its users and users’ locations through the GPS feature.^[39] Countries and regions such as India, the United States,China and Taiwan all fear that the app poses a threat to national or regional security for various reasons.^[39][40][41] In Taiwan, legislators were concerned that the potential exposure of private communications was a threat to regional security.^[39] In June 2013, the Indian Intelligence Bureau flagged WeChat for security concerns. India has debated whether or not they should ban WeChat for its possibility in collecting too much personal information and data from its users.^[41][42][43]

China

Users in China also have expressed concern for the privacy issues of the app. Human rights activist, Hu Jia was jailed for three years for sedition. He speculates that the guobao officials, or the internal security bureau, listened to his voicemail messages that were directed to his friends, repeating the words displayed within the voice mail messages to Hu Jia. Chinese authorities have further accused the app of threatening individual safety. China Central Television (short CCTV), a state run broadcaster, featured a piece in which WeChat was described as an app that allows criminals an easy way in due to its location-reporting features. CCTV gave an example of such accusations through reporting the murder of a single woman who was murdered by a man she met on WeChat after he attempted to rob her. The location-reporting feature, according to reports, was the reason for the man’s knowing of the victim’s whereabouts. Authorities within China have linked WeChat to numerous crimes. The city of Hangzhou, for example, has reported over twenty crimes in the span of three months.^[39][44]

Supporters

Supporters of the app argue that WeChat is overall safe. Martin Johnson, a founder of the anti-censorship site GreatFire.org, states that WeChat is a less potential threat than the app Weibo based on WeChat’s focus on messaging between well-known acquaintances and social groups. Doug Young, a Shanghai-based author of the Party Line, notes that while the app may practice self-censorship within China, it will not, however, practice the same censorship ideals outside of China. Doing so, according to Young, would affect the app's image and possibility hamper its global expansion.^[45]

Indiatimes had an article on why they thought WeChat had plentiful features and was a good alternative.^[46]

XcodeGhost malware

On 24 September 2015, Apple published a list of the top 25 most popular apps infected with the XcodeGhost malware, confirming earlier reports that version 6.2.5 of WeChat for iOS was infected with it.^[47][48][49] The malware originated in a counterfeit version of Xcode (dubbed "XcodeGhost"), Apple's software development tools, and made its way into the compiled app through a modified framework.^[50] Despite Apple's review process, WeChat and other infected apps were approved and distributed through the App Store. Even though some sources claimed that the malware was capable of prompting the user for their account credentials, opening URLs and reading the device's clipboard,^[51] Apple responded that the malware was not capable of doing "anything malicious" or transmitting any personally identifiable information beyond "apps and general system information" and that it had no information that suggested that this had happened.^[47] Some commentators considered this to be the largest security breach in the App Store's history.^[50]

Web client

WeChat provides a Web-based client, with messaging and file transfer capabilities, and it provides WeChat app for Apple Mac users.But not other functions can be used, such as the detection of nearby people. To use the Web-based client, it is necessary to first scan a QR code using the phone app. This means it is not possible to get onto the WeChat network if you do not possess a suitable smartphone with the app installed.^[52]

WeChat could be accessed on Windows using Bluestacks until December 2014.^[53][54] Beginning then, WeChat blocks Android emulators and accounts that have signed in from emulators may be frozen.^[55]

There are some reported issues with the Web client. Specifically when using English, some users have experienced autocorrect, autocomplete, autocapitalization, and autodelete behavior as they type messages, and even after the message is sent. For example, "gonna" gets autocorrected to "go", the E's get autodeleted in "need", "wechat" gets autocapitalized to "Wechat" but not "WeChat", and after the message is sent, "don't" gets autocorrected to "do not". However, the autocorrected word(s) after the message is sent appear on the phone app as the user originally typed it ("don't" is seen on the phone app whereas "do not" is seen on the Web client). Users can translate foreign language during the conversation and the words posted on moments. However, it is basically a useless function because the words after translation are full of mistakes.

Collaborations

In 2015 WeChat collaborated with Cogobuy's subsidiary IngDan Ltd for the "WeChat Hardware Competition". Cogobuy and WeChat successfully established an IoT ecosystem partnership with over one million followers as of February 2015.^[56] By forming a closed loop ecosystem, Cogobuy serves each entrepreneur and innovator, even the entire IoT industry. IngDan Ltd provides the consolidated support with supply chain services and resource connectivity to assist hardware innovators to produce their products, as well as the platform to promote their products to there over one million WeChat followers through the collaboration.^[57]

See also

• Comparison of instant messaging clients
• Tencent Holdings
• QQ Player
• Internet censorship in China

References

External links

• Official WeChat website
• Official English WeChat website