as a chat app, wechat isn't even that great. you have to manually select the high quality option for pictures and then manually download pictures. whatsapp does this automatically in the background. there is no backup feature like whatsapp that i am aware of. signing up and verifying is also a little confusing. wechat is generally worse than whatsapp in slow/bad connection scenarios.
in my opinion, wechat will never be popular outside of china because it is basically a chinese app os inside your phone. wechat's power only becomes apparent when actually in china where basically anything you do from payments to booking travel to riding the metro can be done from wechat.
Seems fairly bad from the developer side, from a look at their documentation. Some of the instructions seem to direct you to use a Chinese UI: https://open.wechat.com/cgi-bin/newreadtemplate?t=overseas_o...
And there's some licensing requirements that, while translated, seem to be Chinese business licenses?
Ignoring the China context, it's good to take char count (possibly correcting for char width) for all strings in all translations and doing a edge-testing localization. QAs will know how to walk through the app without understandable text but they'll be able to spot overflows easily then.
> QQ messenger – already had over 750 million monthly active users by the time WeChat launched. A user could port her entire QQ social graph to WeChat by just logging in with her QQ ID.
It sounds like WeChat is really just a renamed QQ of sorts. So any adoption comparison of messenging app uptake in other countries with that of WeChat in China should use the QQ launch of 1999, which makes WeChat's rise to ubiquity far less impressive.
Mobile QQ had more users than WeChat until 2015, and even today, there remain parts of the country + user segments that strongly prefer QQ on mobile.
So the misunderstanding is mutual.
The English interface is reasonably well-tested (many of my Chinese friends use it to practice their English), but other languages might cause overflowing UI elements because the translated text is longer than accounted for.
That problem also affects the English version in some places e.g. when adding a contact, the short introduction you can write to explain who you are and why you're adding them has a length limit. It's probably enough for Chinese text, but requires being very concise when using English.
Many features are designed to prevent virality. Comments on a friend's timeline ("moments") are only visible to your shared friends. Small chat groups can be bootstrapped by scanning a QR code or by typing a shared passcode simultaneously, but beyond 100 users newcomers need to be invited by a member first. Comments on public articles are hand-picked by the author and only the author can reply directly. There used to be a feature displaying trending articles, but it seems to have been removed.
Those limitations prevent regime-critical opinions from spreading too quickly, but they also mean that only users with a large social circle on WeChat are going to stick with the app.
The article mentions women being harassed via the "people nearby" feature. My impression is that it is mostly used by men looking for hookups and by "women" who are prostitutes or pretend to be prostitutes to scam those men.
Successfully entering a market without already-strong ties to China would have required making large changes about the way their app works.