WeChat was born five years ago today. Here’s our potted history of China’s most essential app.
October 2010: In development
In a Tencent office in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, away from the company’s Shenzhen HQ, a small team starts working on a mobile chat app.
January 21, 2011: Tencent launches a messaging app
It started quietly on this day five years ago when Tencent, already China’s social media giant with its MSN-style QQ instant messenger and accompanying Qzone social network (with 780 million active users at the start of 2011), made a mobile-only messaging app. It was a big break from Tencent’s very PC-era social networks and online gaming empire.
WeChat as it looked at launch. It was initially only available on iOS. Image credit: The Next Web.
The new app was called Weixin in Chinese. There was no English name yet. The Next Web, the only major news outlet to report the launch, transliterated the Chinese name and dubbed it “micro letters.”
China’s three telecoms companies already had online messaging apps that were proving popular, but Tencent wanted to bring down the telco barriers that existed between people and make a chat app that disrupted SMS and worked on any phone and on any mobile service – screw the telcos.
Screw the telcos!
The launch of Weixin came as Kik and WhatsApp – both released in 2010 – were gaining traction. Neither Kik nor WhatsApp are blocked in China.
WeChat’s first iteration started out basic, with just text messaging, voice clips, and the ability to send photos.
August 2011: WeChat adds video clips
Anyone familiar with the dizzying array of features in Tencent’s other products would have guessed that WeChat would not stay so minimal for long.
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