WeChat update! China Mobile is the only victim

The Apple version of WeChat has been greatly updated, and countless Apple fans praised it, saying that they have been waiting for this feature for 10 years.

No one would have thought that China Mobile, the only victim, was in a very complicated mood.

In the past two days, many iOS users have discovered that their WeChat suddenly supports the CallKit function. They said that this surprise came too sudden. They have been waiting for this function for many years and no longer have to worry about missing voice calls.

Simply put, the CallKit function allows you to make voice and video calls from friends on WeChat without having to click on the WeChat message notification, open WeChat, and then accept these cumbersome steps. It is very easy to miss them when you are on the road. Instead, WeChat integrates voice and video calls into the system call function, which can be directly displayed on the system interface, including being able to answer the call directly in the lock screen state.

Through testing, it was found that WeChat voice calls can be answered directly on Lingdong Island, and can also be answered directly in the locked frequency state. However, video calls still need to jump to the WeChat interface and click answer again to connect.

Android phone users may find this incredible, as it has been like this for a long time. When someone calls WeChat, the lock screen will pop up directly, without the need to open WeChat. Except for the difference from the system call interface, there is no other difference.

That’s right, Android has already implemented this feature many years ago, but Apple users have not had it. To be more precise, Apple users have only used it for two years. Because this CallKit feature was actually supported by Apple’s iOS system in 2016, and domestic users could use it normally at the beginning, but in May 2018, WeChat suddenly stopped providing this feature to domestic iOS users, and only recently started internal testing.

But whether it is Android or Apple users, the one that reacted the most to this feature is probably China Mobile, and that is China Mobile's eternal pain.

More than a decade ago, before WeChat came out, the most powerful social software in China was China Mobile's Fetion. It was at its peak at the time and had one foot in the door of mobile Internet.

In an era when 30M of traffic cost 5 yuan and a text message cost 1 cent, Mobile Fetion was launched in 2007. Sending messages was free, and 5 yuan could send thousands of messages. It was like discovering a new continent for countless college students and young people. Fetion became popular all over the country overnight.

No one could have imagined that it would take China Mobile just five months to reach 100 million users. Three years later, in 2010, Fetion reached its peak, with 500 million registered users.

One mobile executive even boasted that he would "steal 20% of mobile QQ users." This blatant poaching put Tencent under great pressure.

It is a pity that the senior management of China Mobile was extremely short-sighted and even complacent. At the critical moment of user growth, not only did they start charging fees, but they also set thresholds for China Unicom and China Telecom users. Non-China Mobile numbers were not allowed to be registered, and only sending messages between China Mobile users was free.

China Mobile did not focus on how to optimize the software user experience. Users tolerated the ugly page design, cumbersome operations and lags, but Fetion often crashed and exited, and the pent-up anger of young people could no longer be contained.

Fetion also used ambiguous marketing tactics to induce users to use it for free. Many Unicom and Telecom users did not know that China Mobile's free service was only for mobile numbers until they were overcharged in the second month. Many people began to abandon Fetion in anger. In addition, Fetion also deliberately restricted the user experience of non-China Mobile users in order to force users to switch to China Mobile through the "three choices" policy, so that they can make money slowly on their own. This was the main short-term calculation from the beginning to the end.

In the final analysis, in China Mobile's eyes, Fetion is just a traffic diversion tool, and it has never been associated with the application of the next era. Tools are just tools, they are only temporary and will be discarded after use, so Fetion's failure is inevitable.

At the same time, it was the blatant threat from Fetion that led Ma Huateng to personally supervise and accelerate the incubation of internal competition at Tencent, which led to the emergence of WeChat, led by Zhang Xiaolong, in 2011.

Zhang Xiaolong is well aware of Fetion's shortcomings . It is free from the beginning and does not restrict anyone from using it. Its smooth and seamless experience is far superior to Fetion.

Afterwards, WeChat took another risky move and obtained the permission to copy users' address books and recommend friends. In less than half a year, WeChat swept the country, and in less than a year and a half, it had more than 200 million users. China Mobile's Fetion was almost forgotten overnight.

A few years later, when WeChat, which already had more than 600 million users, attempted to integrate communication functions directly into the system, it was met with fierce opposition from China Mobile. The matter even reached the top leaders, because this was tantamount to shaking the foundation of China Mobile. They wanted to kick China Mobile out completely and make it just a traffic channel behind WeChat. China Unicom and China Telecom had nothing to say, but China Mobile really couldn't stand it.

It’s just that WeChat gave in at the time and did not insist on integrating WeChat directly into the user system phone interface. However, other functions are already available, and China Mobile can only sigh in despair.