Many Asian American people got onto WeChat just so they could remain connected with their relatives back in China.įurther, WeChat was smart to open up the platform to third-party developers, who started offering their services on WeChat platform. The more users they got onto the platform, the more other users wanted to join in order to be connected with their friends and families. WeChat has benefitted from very strong network effects - both direct and indirect - in the Chinese mobile-first market. WeChat today in China is a single app for Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Venmo, Grubhub, Amazon, Uber, Apple Pay and many other such services in the West. This is just ~150MUAs fewer than Facebook and WhatsApp which are still largely messaging apps. The growth of Monthly Active Users (MAUs) has been phenomenal with the last reported figures of ~850 million MAUs in Q3 2016, primarily from Asia. That helped WeChat become one of the fastest apps to have over a billion registered users. WeChat was one of the few apps that were introduced as mobile-first products amidst rapidly increasing smartphone penetration in China.
Initially launched as a messaging app to send texts in 2011 by Tencent (one of the three Chinese tech giants - Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent), it has evolved from just an ‘app’ to a ‘platform’. In the mobile-first world of China, WeChat has built a ‘mobile lifestyle’ touching various aspects of users’ lives, with an average user opening WeChat 10 times a day and spending ~40 minutes per day. The blog discusses how WeChat has used the strong network effects to emerge as the one app that rules them all. With ~850 million monthly active users, it now offers to its users what Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Venmo, Grubhub, Amazon, Uber, Apple Pay, etc.
Introduced as a messaging app in 2011 by Tencent, WeChat has evolved into lifestyle platform for users in China. This post was originally published on the Digital Initiative’s classroom blogging platform.
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