It may seem outlandish to talk about a mobile app while recording my expat life, but it makes sense in its own way.
This morning I noticed WeChat could not load on my phone, a Pixel 3. I rebooted and it didn’t help. I removed and reinstalled and it didn’t help. I removed all data and files through my laptop and reinstalled and it didn’t help. The app will simply hang at loading.
It’s not a big deal as I could still contact my family with WhatsApp. My children are actually using Discord. As a user I don’t like WeChat for its usability and I absolutely despise it from technical point of view as a computer scientist.
Unfortunately, without WeChat, I was entirely cut off from the Chinese community in Braga and Portugal. I communicate with Chinese students, faculty, parents of CLIB, and other community members exclusively through WeChat. With days left in my Fulbright assignment, it means I will depart without an opportunity to say goodbye.
The Chinese community is by and large invisible in Braga, despite the fact that there are a good size of population of students at the University of Minho and researchers at the International Nanotechnology Lab (INL). There are dozens of Chinese restaurants and numerous Chinese stores all over the city. I suspect much of this exclusion was caused by WeChat. WeChat is a super App that includes functions of Facebook+Twitter+LinkedIn+YouTube+Chrome+Paypal+Venmo. Within the boundary of China, it’s the only app that you would ever need and desire. Outside China, you find it on every single phone of Chinese people because that’s the only way to keep touch with anyone inside China, whether a family member or a high school classmate.
WeChat is the worst thing on the Internet because:
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Intentionally poor security be design. There is no end-to-end encryption and the app demands every possibly permissions that are often totally irrelevant to the way it is used.
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Poor coding and programming practices. Its unconstrained appetite for memory and storage space is atrocious.
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Total disregard of user experiences.
Unlike Baidu, which only affect people inside China, WeChat is a hazard for everyone who has any ties to any Chinese.
Coming back to the loading hang, it was probably caused by the new system updates on Pixel phones, which are usually slated to received the newest Google systems. It’s either an unapproved back channel that was finally caught up by a security patch or a memory abuse that ran conflict with the new memory pattern. Neither sounds an easy fix may be in sight.