WeChat! Your mobile social circle

    Launched in early 2011 by China's Tencent Holdings Limited, WeChat is an instant messaging software that supports Android and iOS mobile operating systems and is designed for smartphone users. Users can share text, pictures and stickers with their friends through the client. It also supports group chat and voice, video intercom function, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, photo/video sharing, location sharing, message exchange contact, WeChat Pay, WeChat Money, games and other services, as well as Feed for sharing streaming content and the location-based social plug-ins "Shake The company also has a feed for sharing streaming content and location-based social plug-ins "Shake", "Friend Finder" and "People Nearby" to quickly add friends. In a product planning email, Tencent's President Ma Huateng confirmed the name of the product as "WeChat", signifying the birth of a miniature chat software.

    WeChat's unique features made it popular as soon as it was launched, and by March 2012, WeChat had already reached 100 million users. In April of the same year, Tencent began to make attempts to bring WeChat to the international market, renaming the English version of WeChat 4.0 to "WeChat" for the purpose of its European and Americanisation, and later introducing multi-lingual support. In the course of continuous development, WeChat was updated with many new features, such as an emoji shop, the "Classic Airplane Battle" game, the Favorites function and the Tencent Pay function. As of 15 August 2013, WeChat had over 100 million registered users internationally. To make WeChat even more versatile, the WeChat team announced the official launch of the app on 28 December 2017. According to the official description, mini-games are a category of mini-programs, which are ready to play without downloading and installing, and can be played with friends within WeChat, such as matchmaking and huddle.

Instant messaging is the main social function of WeChat, and only people who are WeChat contacts to each other can instant message (to use WeChat you must register an account, and in a secure state of account, users can log out). In the pass frame, there are functions such as text messaging, voice messaging, voice input, voice and video chat, photo and video sharing, location sharing, WeChat red envelopes and money transfer. Using Bluetooth and other near-field communications, WeChat can get in touch with people nearby and offer a variety of features that make it easy for people to connect at any time. It is also integrated with social networking service platforms such as Tencent QQ and Facebook. Photos can also be annotated with filters and annotations, and text messages can be machine-translated. WeChat supports different types of instant messages, including text messaging, video, voice messaging, real-time conversations and emoji packs. Users can send pre-saved or real-time pictures and videos, other users' business cards, coupons, red packets or current location.

    Circle of Friends is a branded WeChat friend update push service. Users can post text, post images, videos, make comments and share internal or external links in Friend Circle. External links include various types of app content such as music and news, while internal links are mainly WeChat public articles. Users who are associated with Facebook and Twitter accounts will automatically be synced to these two accounts when they update their friends' circles. Other friends can comment on and 'like' the content posted. Friends are extremely private and only friends can view the contents of a user's friends' circle unless they have turned on the ability for non-friends to view the last 10 posts. Only friends can comment on and view the likes and comments of users who are friends with each other. For example, if user A comments on a friend post by user B, who is friends with C, but if user C is not friends with user A, they will not be able to see A's comments. Before posting a friend, the user can also set the visibility range to determine whether certain friends or groups can see the friend's message. Pictures and videos posted by users can be set to 'private' at any time for their own viewing.

    In addition to the two features mentioned above, WeChat also has Public, Pay and Swipe. WeChat is undoubtedly a successful social app. As of March 31, 2020, WeChat has over 1.2 billion monthly active WeChat users. Before we know it, WeChat has been around for 10 years. In these 10 years, WeChat has grown from an obscure and simple chat app to a digital lifestyle platform with over 1.2 billion monthly active users. WeChat is no longer an ordinary social tool, but an integral part of our lives.