> WeChat is lightyears ahead of what the west can offer , in terms of product. It has many many useful features and is smooth, reliable

As a westerner, is there like a list of such use cases to help get the point across? The things I've read so far here sound like the kind of things we already have offerings for too (making travel easier or etc), just not usually all under one roof.

Sending money via text is a great example, but reading more examples would be helpful in understanding, which is why I ask.

I have lived in China for 6 months, and from the top of my head:

- Voice/Text Chat

- (Video) calling

- Payment service (like Apple or Android pay)

- Buy movie tickets

- Buy plane tickets

- Send money via Chat.

- Splitt the bills.

- Pay the government (utility companies etc) directly from WeChat

- Find people nearby (like tinder? But less so than TanTan)

- Chat on desktop (like whatsapp web, but native client)

- Log on to services (like FB or Google log on)

- Share (real time) location with other people.

- Translate text (Chinese <-> english) (Life saver for me)

There were days when you would seriously just use WeChat, no other apps except maybe Baidu and AliPay.

Anyway, there are more features I'm sure, these are just the ones I remember using.

I lived in china for 9 years. I preferred using my unionpay card to buy things (didn't work at the wet market) and had a separate app for didi dache. You don't have to do all one things in wechat if you don't want to (accept maybe wepay), and I prefer not to for myself (wife is a different story).

After moving to California from Beijing, I can do all those things easily now online. What wechat offered instead was he Chinese preference for having everything in one place and getting around weaknesses in infrastructure. It isn't intrinsically better than what we have in the west, just different and suited for china.

"After moving to California from Beijing, I can do all those things easily now online."

I'd find it hard, in California, to do any of these things:

- Send a small payment to a friend (sure, Venmo, but most of my friends don't have Venmo)

- Buy movie tickets and choose a seat

- Pay in a restaurant without risk of my card being cloned

- Pay a water or electricity bill

- Share (real time) location with other people (yes, 'Find my friends' works if we're on iOS, but now everyone is, and it has major setup friction, and no concept of temporary sharing or groups)

- I never tried.

- Chinese wife buys movie tickets online all the time, chooses seat if the theater has reserved seating.

- credit cards in America put fraud burden on merchants. This is very different from china (ICBC grumble) and fraudsters in the states will target Chinese using credit cards in the states accordingly.

- online, on autopay.

- iPhone has had that feature for forever.

- I never tried.

Try it. It's hard due to fragmentation.

- Chinese wife buys movie tickets online all the time, chooses seat if the theater has reserved seating.

Which app or site will let me buy a cinema ticket and choose a seat, on a mobile phone. - credit cards in America put fraud burden on merchants. This is very different from china (ICBC grumble) and fraudsters in the states will target Chinese using credit cards in the states accordingly.

In theory, yes, it's on the merchant. In practice, it's a whole lot of hassle if your mag stripe card gets skimmed.

- online, on autopay.

Autopay isn't online. Unless you mean your computer or phone has to be on, or the autopay doesn't work.

- iPhone has had that feature for forever.

Doesn't work if even a single member of the group uses Android (or Windows or BB), which is pretty likely in a group of more than 4 people.

> Try it. It's hard due to fragmentation.

I've never needed to give any money.

> Which app or site will let me buy a cinema ticket and choose a seat, on a mobile phone.

There are literally tons of apps for this. It isn't hard at all. Heck, just use fandango and be done with it, if you want.

> - credit cards in America put fraud burden on merchants. This is very different from china (ICBC grumble) and fraudsters in the states will target Chinese using credit cards in the states accordingly.

> In theory, yes, it's on the merchant. In practice, it's a whole lot of hassle if your mag stripe card gets skimmed.

Fuck ICBC. Chinese restaurants in Bellevue would pray on Microsoft China employees just because they knew they could scam their credit cards while, when reported to ICBC, would just say "prove you didn't make those charges!" Whereas if it was a non-Chinese AmEx, it wouldn't be a problem at all. Just fuck ICBC, and WePay is a Chinese solution to a Chinese problem.

> Autopay isn't online. Unless you mean your computer or phone has to be on, or the autopay doesn't work.

My gas bill, electric bill, and water bill were just paid a week ago, I didn't have to do anything. EVERY utility has an online presence, and they all support autopay. My rent is on autopay also, as is my car loan, all setup online, the only bills I pay manually are my credit card ones and whatever I get from the hospital, again, paid all online.

> Doesn't work if even a single member of the group uses Android (or Windows or BB), which is pretty likely in a group of more than 4 people.

There are plenty of location services if you don't want to use what is built into iPhone. Note that the iPhone map service works even in China, as my wife had me on it a lot when we lived in Beijing.

"There are plenty of location services if you don't want to use what is built into iPhone."

You've missed, or are ignoring, my point: in China, if I want to share my location with a bunch of friends, I can do it almost instantly. Just add them to a WeChat group and make two taps.

With a group of friends in the US, I can't, because there's no single app/service that they're all using, that has that feature.

Also:

- Card skimming isn't a uniquely "Chinese problem".)

- The fact that you're comparing mobile utility bill payment in China, with autopay in the US, suggests to me you haven't tried mobile bill payment in China.

- You are right about Fandango - it appears their mobile app has offered seat selection in many theatres for at least a couple of year.

Card skimming isn't uniquely a Chinese problem, but asshole credit card issuers who put the burden of proof in the customer rather than store are. Seriously, china has unique self-made problems that don't exist elsewhere.

Fandango has been around for many years.

We just moved to the USA from Beijing. We have pretty much everything we had back in china without wechat.

Sans the language translation, I don't find any of these activities to be a burden using available channels/providers while living in the US. I actually prefer that they're not consolidated under one roof.

The entrenched monopolies have been actively fighting allowing use of your phone for universal payment. Visa/Mastercard/et al. (rightly, in my opinion) view that as an existential threat.

This is the real reason that we can't do this on phones in the West.

The real reason we simply don't need to do it in the west, while in china you don't have any other option accept to just use cash if you want to buy from the local wet market or pay your didi driver.

Does it have end to end encryption though? That's kind of a killer feature.

No it has built-in tools for sharing your messages with state actors.

Other posts here suggest that WeChat actively censors posts, including in private chat, at the behest of the government, so no.

you can make payments in messenger too...

https://www.facebook.com/help/863171203733904/

`You can send or receive money in Messenger (example: send your friend $10 for lunch or receive $500 from your roommate for rent) after you add a debit card issued by a US bank to your account.`

It requires you to bind your account with a debit card. I am using WeChat for years but I never attach my debit card to it, because I do not have a China debit card. When I need e-money, I just ask my family or give my friends some cash and they transfer e-money to me. That's all. Then I can use the e-money for offline shopping, online shopping, sending Hongbao (as gift-card). I do not understand why debit card is required.

- `How does the money enter the network in the first place? You can use services like Venmo without linking payment information, but obviously you can't withdraw your balance. reply` - `So where is that e-money coming from? You must be linking something... a bank account perhaps?`

Nowadays most people have already linked their accounts with bank. But you still do not have to. When the feature first released in 2014, most people used the e-money for social purposes like sending gift cards and transferring small amount of cash; people just did not withdraw money.

That's one of the most important reasons why WeChat won tens of millions e-money users in a very short period.

How does the money enter the network in the first place? You can use services like Venmo without linking payment information, but obviously you can't withdraw your balance.

One of the options that comes into mind - your could at money using payment terminals or buying a 'refill' card with a code. Not sure how it works on their case though

So where is that e-money coming from? You must be linking something... a bank account perhaps?

Yes, WeChat wallet serves as a non-interest bearing escrow. So someone somehow has to link bank account/debit cards to infuse money into WeChat network first. You obviously need to link to your bank account in order to cash the balance out of WeChat. But given "90%" daily payment use-cases that WeChat covers, you are more likely to spend the balance somewhere than cash them out.

You can very easily link your Chinese bank account to the digital payment services like AliPay and WeChat. All you need is a Chinese bank account (UnionPay) and the phone number that you gave them when you setup the account.

This is mandatory when you ask for an online banking account.

All you do is enter the number on your bank card, they text you a code, you enter the code and the payment or linking of the account is confirmed.

WeChat holds the money - it's like PayPal.

Try being a foreigner with a unionpay card but lacking a Chinese indentity card number. I heard it's better now, but that requirement was always a bummer for me in trying to do payments online.

That problem was solved (for at least the big banks: ICBC, BoC, CMB, CCB) for WeChat at least 2 years before you left China.

For Alipay, it was already solved when I moved to China in 2010.

As recently as last year I had trouble setting up Uber in china because they wanted my Chinese ID number to go along with my Chinese credit card. Thing is, they wouldn't ask if I was using a non Chinese card.

I have both Alipay and Baidu Wallet connected to my Uber China account. I haven't tried linking a Chinese bank card directly to Uber, but I don't have any reason to do that.

Actually, WeChat had that feature way before Messenger did. Messenger basically copied that feature from WeChat.