The Importance of Official Accounts in WeChat

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The biggest frustration is increasingly the fact that there's so much of what's going on that I can't access because it's all in WeChat. A lot of people will like download WeChat in the US and try it out, but you have to actually set your phone to Chinese. You're not getting a taste of it outside. Outside is just a chat app. That's all it is. In China, there is a dual. There's two sorts of centralization happening. One, every single aspect of life, not just online, but also offline, goes through the phone. One, and two, everything on the phone goes through WeChat. It follows then all of the

Ben and James discuss how leverage shifts in a value chain, why WeChat is so powerful in China, and why that is a problem for Apple.

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Links

Ben Thompson: Apple’s China Problem — Stratechery
Ben Thompson: Messaging: Mobile’s Killer App — Stratechery
Ben Thompson: Slack and the State of Technology at the End of 2015 — Stratechery
Connie Chan: When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China — a16z
Ben Thompson: Peak Google — Stratechery
Ben Thompson: Beyond Disruption — Stratechery
James Allworth: The Blessing of Failure — Medium
Ben Thompson: The State of Consumer Technology at the End of 2014 — Stratechery
Ben Thompson: Why Doesn’t Apple Enable Sustainable Businesses on the App Store? — Stratechery