In this blog, we'll show you how to set up your WeChat wallet in just three easy steps and pay on mobile wherever you are. It is a great way to stay connected to friends, keep up with your China news, and even pay! With WeChat Wallet, you can buy groceries, order food online, book a train or flight, pay your bills, top up your phone, transfer money to friends, and so much more. There is no comparable app in the U.S., despite tech companies’ efforts.If you are new to WeChat, you'll soon find out it is the most useful app ever. WeChat’s payment function, meanwhile, is so widely used that coffee shops, museums and some other businesses refuse cash and will take payment only through WeChat or the rival Ant app. Government agencies use it to send out health, traffic and other announcements. WeChat has added video calls and other message features as well as shopping, entertainment and other features. Tencent and its main Chinese competitor, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, aim to make apps that offer so many services that users can’t easily switch to another app. Tencent says WeChat had 1.3 billion users worldwide as of the end of June. Only 33% use desktop computers at all - and mostly in addition to mobile phones. It is also a platform for health code apps the public is required to use prevent the spread of the coronavirus.Ĭhina has 1 billion internet users, and nearly all of them go online by mobile phone, according to the government-sanctioned China Internet Network Information Center.

Operated by tech giant Tencent Holding Ltd., the platform has made itself a one-stop shop for payments and other services and is starting to compete in entertainment. WeChat usage in almost universal in China, where most people never had a computer at home and skipped straight to going online by mobile phone. I know what to do.”īut it’s not clear that WeChat’s success in China means the same idea would translate for a U.S. “So it’s kind of something that I thought would be quite useful for a long time. “Obviously that could be started from scratch, but I think Twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years,” Musk said in August. Musk said he has a “grander vision” for what X.com, an online bank he started early in his career that eventually became part of PayPal, could have been. During Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in August, Musk told the crowd at a factory near Austin, Texas, that he thinks he’s “got a good sense of where to point the engineering team with Twitter to make it radically better.”Īnd he’s dropped some strong hints that handling payments for goods and services would be a key part of the app. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he tweeted without further explanation.īut he’s provided at least a little more detail in the past.

4, the day he reversed his attempts to get out of the deal and announced that he wanted to acquire Twitter after all. Musk kicked off the latest round of speculation on Oct. So far, it’s had little success nearly all of its revenue still comes from advertising. Facebook parent Meta has spent years trying to make its flagship platform a destination for everything online, adding payments, games, shopping and even dating features to its social network. Start with the competition and consumer demand. Next is the question of whether anyone really wants a Twitter-based everything app - or any other super app - to begin with.

First is that a Musk-owned Twitter wouldn’t be the only global company in pursuit of this goal, and in fact would probably be playing catch-up with its rivals. At least, that is, once he’s done buying Twitter after months of legal infighting over the $44 billion purchase agreement he signed in April. Now he also apparently intends to morph Twitter into an “everything app” he calls X.įor months, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has expressed interest in creating his own version of China’s WeChat - a “super app” that does video chats, messaging, streaming and payments - for the rest of the world.

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