When One App rules them all, the case of We Chat and Mobile in China by Connie Chan, first published August 2015.

You can also find and share this essay at a six and C.com

slash Mobile First China.

This post is all about WeChat,

but it's also about more than just WeChat.

While seemingly just a messaging app,

wechat is actually more of a portal, a platform, and even a mobile

operating system, depending how you look at it.

Much has been written about we chad on the context of messaging app trends, but few outside of China really understand how it works, and how it can pull

off what for many companies and countries is still a far-off vision of a world managed entirely

through our smartphones.

Many of W-Chats most interesting features, such as access to

city services, are not even visible to users outside of China. So why should people

outside of China even care about Wechat. The first and most obvious reason is that it

points to where Facebook and other messaging apps could head. Second, Wechat

indicates where the future of mobile commerce may lie.

Third, we chat shows us what it's like to be both a platform and a mobile portal,

what Yahoo could have been.

Ultimately, however, we chat should matter to all of us because it shows what's possible when an entire country,

which currently has a smartphone penetration of 62 percent, that's almost one-third of its population,

leapfrogs over the PC era directly to mobile.

Weechout was not a product that started as a website and then was adapted for mobile.

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