Hi everyone, this is Sonal. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. We have two guests joining the pod today,

longtime A6 and Z partner Connie Chan, who focuses on China and Wired senior writer David Pierce,

who was formerly at the verge. Connie is our resident China expert, and we recently wrote a sort

of ethnographic deep dive on how we chat works and what it tells us about mobile and business in China.

On the exact same day we shared our primer, David wrote a piece in Wired about WeChat and the universal interface that is messaging.

We're kind of jealous actually because his headline also said screw texting.

As David noted, a great messaging app could be to the web browser what the

browser was to the internet before it. Both Connie and David touch on the theme of how a messaging

app can essentially become an operating system for our lives. And so that's where we'll start

the conversation. So in the course of writing the piece that I wrote, one huge unanswered question

that I still kind of have is why does this work so much

better in China than anywhere else? Well, I think there's a number of things in China that make it a

ripe environment for WeChat to really take off. One is email penetration is actually much

lower in China than it is in the States. Also, for people who are constantly texting, there's a lot of

SMS spam in China. And I think a third contributing factor is people, it's very common to have more

than one phone number. A lot of people I know have multiple SIM cards, or there might be picking up other

devices and having multiple phone numbers. And so it's an environment where it's really

hard to figure out how to contact someone. Yeah. And I feel like there's a big part of that that's

just, there's so little sort of technical inertia in a lot of that stuff where China has grown

so fast and they've kind of skipped things like email and these sort of these things that weigh us

down in places like the US now where they're they're not using laptops as much as we are like

for so many people I should know this number off the top of my head but I don't there for so many

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