1st gen? are you kidding? millions of its international users love it no mention 1 billion domestic users. it's just mostly designed for Chinese users.

uh, what? it has many more features than any western messenger. what makes it appeal less to western audiences is that it is precisely tailored to chinese taste/lifestyle, which is distinctively different.

Which derails the parent's vision that it would be a popular messenger in the US. Uh, what?

Your post said it’s the worst from a technical standpoint, but I’d argue it failed from a feature standpoint: half assed localization, features tailored for the Chinese market (for instance push to talk is huge there), and regarding the stickers thing, non-western friendly UI (east Asia is used to higher density designs, see any webpage in Chinese or Japanese)..

Even things like lack of encryption are missing features that we care about but Chinese users don’t, not a technical evaluation.

One feature that WeChat nailed is performance in low bandwidth connections common in China in 2010, but it’s not like that’s something we in the west care about on 3G+ connections.