Q&A: WeChat guru Matthew Brennan on the superapp’s next move

There are few products in China as influential as WeChat. The Chinese social app dominates the daily life of its 889 million monthly active users – a third of them spend more than four hours on it every day. And with payments, blogs, chat groups, newsfeeds, and an ever-expanding selection of services embedded inside, WeChat is often described as a mobile operating system instead of an app.

Matthew Brennan, co-founder of China Channel, has made a close study of WeChat. He’s one of the few thought leaders on this in the English-speaking world, a veritable Wechat-phile. He follows every release of the app, tracking and analyzing the pulse of its development.

In two years’ time, we might see a considerably different system for businesses on WeChat.

“It’s moving so fast. There’re changes coming out almost every week recently,” he says, referring to WeChat’s latest feature, mini programs. Comparable to Google ‘instant apps,’ mini programs are lightweight applications that don’t require installation and run inside WeChat.

“I think in two years’ time, we might see a considerably different system for businesses on WeChat,” Brennan adds.

See: WeChat wants to use mini programs to tap into offline traffic

Born in London, Brennan has lived in China for the past 13 years. Unlike many expats, he’s spent most of that time outside of major Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai. In fact, during the beginning of his experience in China, he lived in Ordos, the notorious “ghost town” in Inner Mongolia, where local farmers have become rich off coal reserves.

Those were interesting times, says Brennan.

“There were so many people running around in crazy cars, like really big land rovers and expensive sports cars,” he recounts, laughing. “They’d just come around and be like, Come and drink baijiu with us, get in the car!”

Last week, I caught up with Brennan during one of his regular circuits through Shanghai to discuss the latest trends in WeChat, common misconceptions around the app, and more. The following is an edited excerpt of our conversation.

How do you explain WeChat to people outside of China?

Often you need to compare it to other platforms [like Facebook], otherwise people get lost.

But when you look at it beyond the fact that they’re both in social, when you look at their business model, when you look at how WeChat works and how Facebook works, there’s very few things that are similar. Although they are definitely competitors on the global scale, how they do what they do is totally different.