Outside of China, WeChat is a fish out of water

About a month ago, I was in New York visiting a tech-savvy friend. The living definition of “early adopter,” his entire home is voice-controlled with Amazon Echo, from his lights to his air-conditioner to his dishwasher. He seems to have a detailed opinion on just about every trend in consumer technology, and at work, he specializes in optimizing user experience for a fast-growing tech startup.

We have remained friends after meeting a few years ago in Beijing, when he was studying Chinese at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Since he returned to the United States, we mainly keep in touch through WeChat, but if it were up to him we would probably use a different messaging app.

Looking at the problem WeChat is having in its expansion overseas highlights broader trends that encompass Chinese internet companies when they globalize.

“The more I work in app design, the more frustrated I am using WeChat, because I keep noticing more and more flaws in it. Especially considering how many users they have, they really should offer a better user experience than they do,” he explained to me.

Indeed, he’s not the only one who has trouble using WeChat, and it has shown in the failure of the app to catch on with those who are not Chinese or communicating with Chinese people regularly.

For those of us who live in China, using it becomes so natural that we often don’t notice some of its flaws, like a fish that doesn’t realize it is swimming in water, since it has never left the river. But outside of China, WeChat is like a fish out of water. Here are a few of the key issues that may provide some insight as to why WeChat is struggling outside of the Chinese market:

Local storage

All message history in WeChat is stored locally on your device. This means that when you buy a new phone or log in to WeChat from a new device, your previous messages must be transferred manually. If your phone is lost or stolen, losing all that data can cause a real annoyance. WeChat claims that this is for privacy reasons, but that leads me to my next point…

Security, privacy, and transparency

Unlike many other messaging apps, WeChat does not provide end-to-end encryption. Instead, they employ transport encryption so that the message is encrypted between the user and WeChat’s servers.

When end-to-end encryption (e2ee) is used, the message is scrambled from the time it leaves the sender’s device to the time it arrives at the recipient’s, and only the recipient’s device possesses the digital “key” necessary to un-scramble the message. For messaging apps like WeChat that do not use e2ee, a second “key” is held in the company’s servers, allowing them to decrypt messages that use their platform. While even e2ee is not 100 percent unhackable, when it is not used, there is an additional point of vulnerability where the message’s security could be compromised. The more keys there are, the more ways there are for others to get in.

The lack of end-to-end encryption could make WeChat messaging more vulnerable to hacking for corporate or personal reasons.

What is perhaps more concerning is the lack of transparency from Tencent about issues of privacy and security regarding WeChat. In contrast, Facebook’s annual Global Transparency Report provides figures of the number of requests for information it has received from governments on a country-by-country basis, for the benefit of those concerned about surveillance. The figures relate to its products and services including Messenger and WhatsApp. Facebook claims to offer no “back door” into their end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messenger, and despite public pressure from Brazilian authorities and the FBI, there has been no evidence to suggest that they offer such a “back door.”

Facebook has also been open about its use of Signal encryption protocol for both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger’s “Secret Conversations” feature, an open-source protocol which is reviewed by cryptology experts. Facebook has published whitepapers as well, providing technical specification for how the encryption protocol is deployed.

In contrast, Tencent does not regularly publish a transparency report and does not have a policy of disclosing requests for personal information. They have provided little-to-no details regarding what encryption protocol they use for messaging, so it is nearly impossible for the average user to know exactly how secure their data is when using WeChat.

Localization

Other nuisances

Final thoughts