Weixin or WeChat – the hottest new chat app out there!



Some things come out of China that are totally unique; some things come out that are copies; Weixin is a combination of both. If you’re looking for the best chat app that I’ve ever seen, head over to your local app site, either Apple or Android, and look for Weixin or WeChat. They are the same thing, one totally English and the other a combination of Chinese and English.

Tencent, the same people that brought out QQ a few years ago, have managed to cobble together an amazing app which allows text chatting as well as video messaging, photo sharing and voice messaging. You can tie Weixin in with your QQ account, which is what I did, or you can sign up for a whole new account. Once you’re into it, you can then find out which of your friends on other social media, including Facebook, are already on Weixin/WeChat. Of course, as is always the case, you can also invite your friends to use the app as well.

I don’t have an iPhone or an Android device but I do have an iPod Touch. Weixin works perfectly well with it and I’m usually chatting away when I have wifi around. The text is a bit slow with my touchscreen keyboard but the photo sharing and video or voice messaging are extremely fast and stable.

One of the best or weirdest things about WeChat, depending on how social you are, is that you can find other users who live close to you by using the GPS gizmo in your mobile device. I’m in Canada and almost all of my online friends are in China. Well, enter Weixin and all of a sudden I’m chatting with people who live only a few kilometres away. To me, that is a lot of fun, specially since only Chinese users are online at this point. As time goes by, I’m sure many Western peeps will adapt Weixin but, for now anyway, it’s not as cluttered or spammy as Yahoo or Msn or even Skype.

Basically, if you want to be on the cutting edge of social media, download Weixin on your mobile device and start having some fun. There is a whole world of innovation over there in China. Over 100 million Chinese have started using Weixin in its first year. Tencent already has a massive number of users with their QQ chat app. Consider the fact that at any given time over 100 million QQ users are online at the same time, you’ll understand how China has adapted to online social networking. When you consider that about half of those people are using mobile devices, you’ll understand why it’s important to keep up with what’s happening there. At this point in time, 123,000,000 Chinese are online using QQ. I don’t have stats on Weixin but I’d safely assume that there are millions online with it, too.

Thanks for reading!

38 thoughts on “Weixin or WeChat – the hottest new chat app out there!”

  1. Hi WeChat, 新版iPad的键盘字母和打字出来的字母都太小了,小的让人很别扭,怎样能让字母变大呢?我宁可回到原来的版面,致少字比较大,看起来也舒服。谢谢了!jack

    1. We are not WeChat, just so you know. The only thing you could try is to increase the size of everything on your screen. We don’t have an iPad so we don’t know if you can do that but you should be able to. Good luck and thanks for commenting.

  2. I have a problem with people nearby, I don’t see my about 12k 4k I only see people fear away like 100k 200k please help

  3. Hello, I made a QQ account using my email and, separately, I made a wechat (weixin) accaunt using phone number.
    So this two acaunt are note related each other.
    I would like to tie, connect, synconize, choose the better definition, these two accaunts.
    I tied the QQ ID in the wechat account going in Wechat> settings> account> ID QQ
    but I still haven’t find the way to connect wechat account in qq.
    Thanks,

    Federico

    1. It seems that you can only link QQ and WeChat if you register using QQ. We registered with a phone number and there is not way to link that account to a QQ account. There are only three options: Facebook, phone and email. So, no, you can’t link up two separate accounts. Copy the contacts from one to the other, that’s all you can do. Thanks for commenting.

  4. How do you invite people within wechat account. As far as I understand, people have to use phone number to connect each other. For iPod, I have no idea hoe to get it works. Does anyone has an idea?
    many thanks,

    Jay

    1. You can add people by their WeChat ID, their QQ number or through Google contacts. You can use your mobile contacts too but you’d have to get them from your phone not your iPod obviously. Other than Shake and People Nearby, you can’t just pull people out of the blue. Does this help? Let us know. Thanks for commenting.

  5. Hey, i first signed up with weixin, got a bunch of contacts/friends. Got a new phone (iphone 4s), didn’t understand what was going on, somehow ended up with two accounts. Any way to combine them? Using normal email and phone #, which remained unchanged, is kind of screwed up now.

    1. The only way we can see that might work is if you have the phone numbers of the people you want to add en masse. Go to Contacts then to Settings then to Address Book Matching. If you enable Address Book Matching, WeChat will find everyone on your list who uses WeChat. You would then be able to add them one by one. Seems like your best option. Good luck!
      Thanks for commenting!

  6. Hey, i first signed up with weixin, got a bunch of contacts/friends. God a new phone, didn’t understand what was going on, somehow ended up with two accounts. any way to combine them?

  7. I am using an older Nokia 5530 Xpress music. My friends are all telling me about weixin but I’m not sure if it will work on my phone. Any advice?

    1. According to the Weixin site, your phone will work just fine. There is a Symbian download available there. You can probably download it to your PC and then transfer it to your phone. Good luck! Thanks for commenting.

  8. One weird (and very annoying) thing about weixin: I can see only half of my friends conversations. For example, under a picture it might say, “怎么了?“ but it’s not in response to something I wrote. Initially, I couldn’t understand why my friend was writing “你在合肥.” And when I asked her why she thought that I was there, she asked me why I thought she thought I was there. Since this was all in Chinese, it became quite confusing! I finally figured out what was going on when another friend posted a nonsensical comment. Seems like a major flaw in the software to me; either let us see the whole conversation or don’t let us see either side.

    1. That doesn’t happen here, but that’s probably because we only use Weixin on an iPod. If you are using it on an Android device, the results may vary. We’ll put Weixin on our new Samsung Android phone to see if we can duplicate the problem. Is this solely on Weixin or is it part of the syncing between QQ and Weixin?
      Thanks for commenting!

      1. Thanks for the response, Brian. I’m also using an iPod, but I bet you are correct about the QQ-Weixin sync, since these are all QQ friends.

        1. It seems that the iPod is the problem then, probably because it only has wi-fi. If you move in and out of a wi-fi area, you might miss the messages. Hopefully they will all be on QQ when you log in again. All of our messages that are sent offline by my friends show up when I log on to QQ and also show up on Weixin, at least it seems that way but some may be missing.
          Thanks for both comments!

  9. My friend/teacher/student/知己 has been insisting to me that I could be able to use Weixin on my computer because her friend allegedly does. So far, I have only found it to be usable only on my mobile phone. I will am BC bound (Squamish) for university and as a student from the united states I will not have a data plan on my cell phone (but maybe there will be wifi on campus at Quest), since I teach English and study mandarin via qq, Weixin, weibo, etc. it would be useful if I could get Weixin on my computer (due mainly to the easy-to-use ad efficient voice note feature. Do you have any ideas about how I could achieve this?

    1. Weixin is only for mobile devices, not for PCs. I think you’ll find lots of wi-fi spots around the university. Enjoy Canada!

      Thanks for commenting.

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