Does China’s WeChat show Twitter’s future?

Imagine you’re scrolling through Twitter. You see a new coat and, on impulse, tap ‘buy’. Purchase confirmed. Later, you open Twitter again to order a taxi to a restaurant and once there, you scan a QR code to see the menu, from which you order directly to the table. All of this is charged to your Twitter-wallet, filled with money you’ve received as a birthday present from friends or family, sent of course via Twitter.

These are all real examples of how my family and almost a billion other Chinese use WeChat, a Chinese super-app that has become far more than just a messaging platform. Elon Musk has already expressed his ambitions to turn Twitter into something similar – an ‘everything app’. If he succeeds, British and American lives may soon look much more like the lives of urban Chinese.

WeChat dominates China’s social media scene to the extent that it would be near impossible to live in Chinese towns and cities without it. Pony Ma, the app’s founder and CEO of its parent company Tencent, has described it as an ‘ecosystem’. Businesses create ‘mini-programs’ that allow their services to be accessed directly through WeChat, whether that be bike hire or a doctor’s appointment or even buying stocks.

All this is made possible by WeChat Pay. Tencent saw to it that everyone from luxury department stores to street-side fruit-sellers could be paid by their customers simply scanning a QR code via WeChat and connecting their details for instant payment.

Rivals exist, of course, but alternatives such as Alipay, founded by Jack Ma (no relation to Pony), are more like PayPal than a branch of social media. Through WeChat, my 81-year-old grandmother can send me money via the same chatbox that we’re having a conversation in.