There is ridiculous amount of competition an innovation in the Chinese app market. Every time I visit China, I'm surprised by something new the folks can do with mobile.

That innovation is starting to spill into​ India with Chinese company investments. A year ago, mobile payments in small shops and businesses were ubiquitous only in China, now they're proliferating in Indian cities too.

The Western markets are quite tame in comparison.

Mobile payments aren't so big in the west because they aren't so necessary. Almost every shop in the USA takes cards, the same isn't true in china or many developing markets, but everyone has a phone so let's use the camera and QR codes to get around our lack of infrastructure.

There's something else going on as well, though. People in China will now use Alipay/WeChat to pay at (for example) restaurants even though they have a bank card, and the restaurant can take bank cards. The restaurants increasingly have specialised hardware (maybe part of the same POS terminal that takes bank cards) and aren't using a smartphone to process customers' mobile payments.

True, but is that anymore convenient than card tap? Also, We are seeing QR payments happening in the states also (like at Starbucks) though I honestly don't see the point.

I've not seen contactless card payments in China. I imagine both businesses and consumers would be worried about fraud. Quick payments with a mobile wallet (where the retailer scans a dynamic QR code on your phone) feel safer, as you need to explicitly go to that screen, and you get immediate notification on any transaction on your account.

I don't doubt that there must have been quite a bit of competition before WeChat came into dominance, but is that still true today?

If WeChat is indeed so overwhelmingly dominant in people's lives in China, what strategies do the startups there use to compete with WeChat's core offerings like chat, social networking, payments, and to what degrees of success? Or do startups their just accept WeChat as a piece of infrastructure and try to innovate by building things on top of their platform instead of competing against them directly?

Wechat controls social connection. It is like you cannot compete with Facebook on social as well here. So, you have to cooperate with them.

Good point. I said app market, but I specifically meant messaging app market.

Still a good point, just because they don't have Signal or Facebook (not that I'd trust it) doesn't mean they don't have strong competition in their own field of approved apps.

There was a ton of competition even with mobile messaging before WeChat launched. And the competitors were other Chinese apps.

Every local company I've seen in China run themselves to an extent on WeChat.

A group chat for all employees, a group-per-team, ad-hoc groups for ad-hoc teams. It is assumed to be faster (people check more regularly) than email, less formal, more direct. And the boss can see everything (given they're in the group). Great for teams that want to look busy. I dislike it, as looking busy is different from being busy, but this is a large part of the mainland China work-ethic.

For international companies, megacorps in particular, it is not used officially, but still often gets used, with a disturbing amount of client-specific information leaking that the head-office would strictly discipline should they know, but they don't.

To edit: This was always possible before with QQ, and QQ does have phone apps, but QQ didn't have this casual business-use to the extent WeChat does today.

In short, there is no guarantee. Any message could be deleted at any time for no reason.

How often do messages get deleted?

Try sending a sensitive keyword.

Maybe not if you're in China.

often, they are very fast deleted from your Moments (Wall), heck is you use sensitive keyword they won't be even delivered to the other party in PRIVATE message, so much for this amazing messenger we should look up to

Big government intervention is not the app's fault.

WeChat is censoring the messages, not government, they just give them order and WeChat gladly accept terms in exzchange for China monopoly and protection from international competitors, same go for Facebook, Google and million other services, which Chinese just stole and rebranded. So how exactly it's not their fault they are sleeping in bed with Chinese government?

But could it be part of the reasons for its success ?

Yeah, that's a great question. The reason they have the luxury of not caring about their user count could be that the government takes care of that issue for them by interfering with their competitors.

Random high-profile anecdata for why you should NEVER trust a China-approved messenger: http://www.zeit.de/feature/freedom-of-press-china-zhang-miao...

tl;dr Chinese assistant of a German newspaper was arrested for political signalling on WeChat.

This is a tool that has almost certainly been used to find and kill people in lower-profile cases. It's disgusting to see that HN/SV people will never care about that part of tech. This thread makes me feel terrible.

I wonder how many humans are trawling WeChat for "bad" messages. In addition to the bots.

On WeChat it is really hard to see "bots". Tencent discourage them to do so. There is no supported way for connected apps to send messages automatically -- End users' confirmations are mandatory. So you'll see a more organic feeds.

he was talking about censorship made by Wechat for CCP order

I do, but that's because I don't live in China.