On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat
Some secret weapons this article did not mention<p>1. Allen Zhang (Founder of WeChat) was the author of once popular desktop email client: Foxmail, and later Tencent acquired it, Zhang refactored a new version of web mail on mail.qq.com.<p>In order to support Microsoft Exchange protocol, Zhang and his team reversed engineered it, this was later the foundation of Wechat&#x27;s binary protocol design, in Zhang&#x27;s words, it&#x27;s magnitudes faster and robust than your XMPP copycat. It&#x27;s designed to work well in extremely poor signal coverage area with only GPRS 2G online access.<p>2. Wechant literally stole telecom&#x27;s SMS cake. Tencent put lots of effort striking deals with telecoms, ordinary IM startups might simply be blocked or QoS&#x27;d to death.<p>3. Tecent also pushed very hard to third-party Android ROM publishers to pre-install Wechat. It&#x27;s like 2-5 RMB per new user acquisition and the app can not be deleted unless rooted. Tecent also negotiated to made sure Wechat app always stays in memory and can not be easily killed so push messages can be received, Be noted, because Google was fully stripped in all legit Android phones in China, there&#x27;s no Google Play or GCM service, some other IM competitors are struggling to have basic message receiving capabilities.<p>4. Wechat is a lock-in mega app. Little known fact is it got a Tecent Browser (X5) fully builtin, it&#x27;s an outdated Chromium build and its behavior is kinda headache to debug compared to othe mobile browsers like Chrome or Mobile Safari, lots of customised JS bridges and restrictions.<p>The evil part is that every link you view in wechat must renders exclusively in X5. E.g. if you open a youtube page, it renders in webview in wechat, if you have youtube app installed and wanna view the URL link in app, you have to click for the wechat menu, open the webpage in system browser, so your waste your data bandwidth for the second time and opens the exact webpage, and click &quot;Open in App&quot;.<p>This ensures engagement times.<p>5. Wechat blocks competitor URLs for obvious reasons, e.g. *.taobao.com domain since day 1 because &quot;the link looks malicious and may harm your device&quot;. It force users to choose Tencent equivalents(JingDong).