Netease and China Telecom Made a WeChat Clone; Here’s Why It’s Doomed

There’s no doubt that Tencent’s WeChat is the app to beat in China’s social media market these days. But is it too late for another domestic chat app to rise to prominence? According to a TechWeb report citing anonymous sources at Netease, Netease and China Telecom have partnered up on a WeChat-style chat app called “Yixin” that will reportedly hit app stores early next month. Apparently the app’s biggest innovation is that it allows users to send IMs as SMS messages to friends who don’t have the app installed.

Of course, this is still just a rumor at this point, but it’s definitely an interesting one to contemplate. Allowing users to send chats via SMS is actually pretty clever — it solves the problem of people not using the app because their friends aren’t on it, and it has the potential to help telecom companies earn some extra revenue from SMS fees.

That said, I don’t think this is going anywhere. If it turns out people like the SMS feature, what’s to stop WeChat from simply copying it? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Tencent has done that sort of thing; WeChat is itself pretty much a clone of earlier mobile chat apps like KakaoTalk and Miliao. Moreover, Yixin is already nearly 400 million users behind WeChat. It would have to do something very dramatic indeed to make a big enough splash to eclipse the reigning champ, and I can’t see people getting all that excited over a chat app that also charges them SMS fees. Yes, they can chat with other users even if they don’t have the app installed. But everybody already does have the WeChat app installed, so who cares? There might be some weird niche market for this like there is for China Mobile’s chat app Fetion, but I don’t think mainstream success is a part of Yixin’s future.