They do it to get around very anti competitive behaviour. WeChat pretty much have monopoly on chat in China so if you want to get into that market I guess you have to come up with some way around it. Though I agree that a button that would activate it would likely have been a better way to do it. Even if they did not do anything nefarious this really makes it look like it was.

Spying on users is a dishonorable way to get around another corporate's anti-competitive behavior. Because it was not the only extremely obvious viable option (I mentioned a clearly honest obvious alternative), we have to conclude that they desire to act dishonorably.

That a big dispute in Sina tech. [0]

[0] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3029309/wechat-s...

> Chinese users have been complaining that WeChat’s practice of blocking certain apps is a huge blow to user experience. But WeChat isn’t the only one doing it. Chinese tech companies constantly add services to their own ecosystems and block services from other companies, leading some tech watchers to say that China’s mobile internet has been split into pieces.

Hope they can fix it one day

> Hope they can fix it one day

Taobao/Douyin/etc could save face today by giving you a place to enter links instead of spying.