I've been looking for fair reviews of Wechat, but besides phony can/cannot critics, I found nowhere yet what I'm listing below.

Yes, Wechat is impressive by its payment features, along with great compatibility with other services: food delivery, Didi taxi, shared bike, train ticket, etc. But Wechat is... a chat app. Why is it lagging so much behind its international competitors regarding basic chat features?

  1. No sending confirmation
  2. No reading confirmation
  3. No clear notification of internet unavailability
  4. Late notification of message sending failure (30 seconds to 2 minutes)
  5. No automatic re-sending upon recovery of the internet access.
  6. Impossible to delete or rectify a message after 1 minute. Deleting only removes it from your own log, not the others'!
  7. Worse: Pictures and documents expire after 1 week!
  8. Even worse: Inconsistency of message log when using simultaneously the phone and PC interface: If only one of the 2 is on-line, the messages will only be logged in the on-line machine, and will never by synced into the log of the then off-line machine.
  9. Funny final one: Only 1 bloody ring-tone for 1,000,000,000+ users.

I guess that most of these drawbacks are aiming at reducing internet traffic, but they severely damage the basic chat functionalities.
I'm not trying to get my Chinese visa suspended here, rather I really encourage the above shortcomings to be fixed. Wechat is the hegemonic ubiquitous Chinese chat super-app, therefore no other option. The only way forward is to improve it.

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