It was once very popular before smartphones. Nowadays QQ is primarily used by students, with younger people preferring a more vibrant and playful design. The vibe of QQ and WeChat is somehow similar to Discord and Slack. QQ is more used for casual chats, nostalgia, or hobby-based communities, while WeChat is the default choice for daily communication and connecting strangers. WeChat is also an important payment method comparable to VISA in China making it even more irreplaceable (the competitor in this realm is Alipay).
As of 2024, QQ has around 500 million monthly active users compared to WeChatâs 1 billion. While QQ is indeed a competitor, its influence has declined and is no longer rooted in everyday life. From my experience, most of my old friends kept their QQ logged in but rarely used it. I personally havenât used it since the age of 20. These days, people wonât ask for othersâ QQ anymore (it feels weird) unless they are really close friends, close enough to revisit each otherâs cringe posts from their teenage years.
People are bashing on Wechat because they forget the lessons that Snowden, or Assange shared.
People in the west think the messenger apps in the West are private, and that their govs would never, ever do anything that they werenât supposed to. They believe it with all their heart.
In the west misdeeds are called âclassifiedâ, in Asia theyâre called âcensoredâ. Is there a big difference if the workings of gov are in either case hidden from public scrutiny?
A workaround to your problem is right click + show in finder, and then send the file directly from file system.
Thatâs a good idea when dealing with a single file.
To transfer multiple files at once, drag them from DT to Finder first and then drag from Finder to WeChat. Drawback: this workaround will create a duplicate of the files on your hard drive, which shouldnât be a big issue unless the files of concern are quite large. WeChat will duplicate the files, too, so you end up with 3 copies of the same files on your own device as a result of this simple action.
At the risk of being cheeky: Your response is a rant, too. I myself is a frequent ranter so I donât mind at all others doing the same. It is somewhat surprising to me that you expressed you disdain for ranting yet continued to deliver you own rant.
That is decidedly not true. I mentioned the web-based File Helper, which accepts files dragged from DT. From there it is trivial to send the files to your contacts inside WeChat.
My question was: If you must use WeChat for work (which we may regard as a fact), why do you have the WeChat client installed on your Mac? Is it your work machine? To my knowledge very few companies in China designate Macs as work computers, and the few IT firms that do offer Macs use something more suitable than WeChat, such as Feishu, for communication.
@BillChen2k explained the current situation pretty well. WeChat has dominated instant messaging in China and QQ is now considered nostalgic.
QQ was a highly complex adware in the early 2010s. It was intimidating to the vast number of tech-uninitiated folks. Hundreds of millions of people desired a simple alternative for SMS and phone calls, due to the state-owned triopoly of telecom service providers setting arbitrarily high fees.
Then came WeChat. It was initially designed as exactly an SMS alternative, with a simplistic UI and mandatory binding to the userâs phone number. As WeChat became popular, Tencent utilized its privileged position within Chinaâs tech industry to eliminate competitors and fend off pressure from the telecom giants.
As China pushed to digitize its economy, companies, organizations and even branches of government built their online presence in the form of web apps accessible only within the WeChat app (why that happened is another long story), further cementing WeChatâs dominance. By then WeChat, with a several-hundred-MB installation package, was no longer a simplistic app, but due to its monopoly in the field there was zero incentive for improvement. WeChat had become the new QQ.
In the meantime, the old QQ was simply forgotten. Its core UX remained unchanged for the last 10+ years. Apparently, for Tencent, it was more convenient to build something new than to modernize 1990s technology and clean through a PoS of code.
I received an email to show that the OP raised by myself has some updates. After reading the replies, I really want to write something here not to judge who is right or wrong but to clarify some points:
1, as for the quote I replied, I have to say that I has no choice but to click"+ show in the finder" to deal with file being sent using Wechat app. even it is not a indexed file and the software engineer is not recommended.
2, I could feel BillChen2Kâs frustration and I stand for him at least he is trying his best to resolve the problem and he win my respect.
3, It is meaningless to discuss which messenger app is better than others and that is the reason I would not like to mention the name of the app in my OP until someone really wanted to know and I also thought that it could be useful for the software engineers to resolve the problem.
Well done Bill, you win my respect for trying to resolve this issue that has been frustrated me for a long time.
Those who try to persuade us to abandon using QQ or Wechat need to be aware that QQ or Wechat would be always the last one to use the alternative option. So thanks for the concerning with the app security and how bad are they, we use those on our own risk.