Weixin is an app with many special designs comparing to other IM applications.

Weixin has many great parts. However, like many other things, we get used to good parts, enjoy and then forget the specialness. For uncomfortable parts, we have stronger feelings. So it should be mentioned, although this post may cover more special parts which tell Weixin as a not so nice app, Weixin has its great value for many many many people.

Chats

Wexin Chats enabled many possibilities such transferring a small amount of money between friends, sending lucky red packets which can distribute a random amount of small money to a group of friends.

However, one really special part is the likelihood of blocking messages without noticing users, i.e., user A sends a message to user B can result in a situation that user B doesn’t receive it while user A doesn’t know user B cannot see it. But also worth knowing, this only happens to some politically sensitive messages, which also means, Weixin will check all the messages and the absolute majority of messages are regarded as safe.

Moments

The Moments is a facebook alike feature which enables friends to share photos, text and URLs to each other in a non-disturbing manner.

One special part of moments is some contents shared by users will not show up on the pages of their friends. For example, some web page URLs shared will not show up if the domain name is not licensed by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the users who shared the URLs are not told that their friends cannot see the URLs.

The experience I had in the morning on 23rd, April, 2022, as a viewer of the moments shared by my Weixin friends.

Media Platform

Articles

Channels

Channels means video channels which longer video can be hosted. By default in moments, only video less than 10s can be shared. When hosted on Channels, video can be much longer and also appear with good cover images in moments like short video.

Mini-apps

The mini-apps are apps kind of like Chrome apps which take usage of API provided by Weixin to reuse some resources embedded by Weixin, basically they can be considered as plugins for Weixin although with very limited APIs in this sense.

Multi-platform Applications

As shown on the official website to download Weixin, Weixin has support for applications for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Web.

However, Web version is limited without any further information given, which also means not all users are allowed to use the web version.