Test Version of Major WeChat Upgrade Leaked: More Scanning, More Shaking, More Shopping

Tencent’s WeChat continues to grow and evolve beyond its origins as a pretty simple chat app. Yesterday, QQ Tech somehow got its hands on a test version of the latest upgrade to the app and took it for a spin.

They found some cool new features, but it’s worth pointing out that these features are probably coming only to the Chinese version of the app in the short term, and then to the international version sometime later down the line. And of course, this is just a beta version, the real upgrade hasn’t been released yet, so any and all of this could change before it does. With that said, here’s what they found:

New options for “Companies” and “Subscriptions” in the WeChat address book. The “Subscriptions” option takes you to a page with all the WeChat Public Platform accounts you’re subscribed to follow (see below). It’s not yet clear what the “Companies” option does, but it seems a likely guess that it will take you to a full list of all the companies (as opposed to NGOs, celebrities, fan groups, etc.) that you follow.

No more unread message numbers in WeChat groups. Now, if you have unread messages you’ll just see a little notification flag but no specific number; the idea being that this might help you feel less stressed or behind if you haven’t checked up on the group in a while.

Scanning now includes bar codes, covers, translations, and even your surroundings. You can now scan product bar codes to see a readout of the product and links to ecommerce sites (see below). But that’s not all. You can scan the covers of things like books and CDs to get more information about them. You can scan text in other languages to get an auto-translation of what it says (maybe). And you can even scan your surroundings to get data and feedback about anything interesting in your area. How this all works will be interesting to see in action, but it sure sounds cool.

Shake for video. You can already use WeChat’s “shake” feature to find people in your area or to listen to music, but now you can use it while you’re viewing videos in other apps; WeChat will use the sound to identify the video and then take you to a page that displays more data on it and allows you to easily bookmark it within the app.

User info page now includes “My bookmarks”. Users can now save information, clips, and more from chats to their bookmarks and thus have easy access to them whenever they’d like in the future.