We all love texting and talking, isn’t it? And just to address that need Tencent Technology came up with a great mobile app WeChat. Every minute of using the app was interesting since it took care of my core needs, which is interacting with my friends. Find interesting?? Read on the review…
What is WeChat
According to their website,
WeChat is the complete mobile communication and private social networking app. Free, cross-platform, and full-featured, WeChat is the best way to keep in touch with everyone you care about.
Taking it further, WeChat allows you to text, talk using voice and HD video, share photos with your friends. The people at Tencent have clearly leveraged on the popularity of photo-sharing and social connection by adding a Facebook Connect option.
How does WeChat help?
Text & voice
Text & voice are one of the most basic functions apps of similar type provide and I would see them hardly as any differentiator. While I read some reviews about the ‘hold and talk’ function, personally couldn’t encounter that issue on my phone. But then there are few who have the issue, so there could be a small bug which Tencent might want to take care of.
HD Video
So one of the place where WeChat scores over its competitors is giving the user a facility to have conversations with their friends using HD Video. This is a great option when the user would want to leverage the HD functionality on devices with bigger screen. Though, I would not advise it for people on slower connections or when the available bandwidth is too low.
Photo Sharing
So Tencent clearly understood the wave of photo-sharing apps, what with Instagram and likes doing a great business. Embedding the function to share photos with a group indeed makes them a winner. It’s like a private album over the web.
Open API
This is the other clear winner for WeChat. Having the API available for developers makes it attractive for developing extended functions that would enhance the user experience. In my opinion, developers should leverage this and build multiple extensions for the app.
Web WeChat
You can also do chat using web on your computer. It’s as simple as connecting to the web version of WeChat and scan the QR code to join the chat from web.
What I liked
First, I loved the concept of Open API which gives freedom to the developer community to build extensions for WeChat. While it saves Tencent from investing in ideation and development, it also increases adoption of WeChat. This is one of the best business decision they have made.
And then the photo-sharing app, which they have limited within a group and thus handling the privacy issues.
Parting Comments
Finally, I would say that WeChat is a clear competitor to the likes of WhatsApp and Viber. Just by having an additional functions of photo-sharing and HD Video should make it win more customers. And more than a million downloads, am sure it’s not disappointing app to use.
Thanks to the folks at BlogAdda for recommending this app.
