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WeChat grows to V5.0, gets stickers & payments

WeChat has been on a media blitz lately, its adverts have been on South African cinemas and televisions and they’re racking up new users fast. It was time for the WeChat’s application to grow, and it did, with the update to V5.0 on iOS last night (Android will follow in the coming weeks)which brings 3 very important new features to WeChat. Firstly it brings stickers to chats, stickers have become the new defacto standard offering for any chat application with Facebook Messenger and Google Hangouts also offering the super sized emoticon replacements. The second addition is integration with Tencent’s mobile payment system Tenpay into the sticker store which will allow users to buy premium sticker backs as well as download new free stickers for their chats. Thirdly and perhaps most important for the growth of WeChat as a social community as opposed to just another chat application, is the addition of a game center. Gaming for WeChat was announced last month and the service should be an attractive drawcard for developers looking to service one of the fastest growing platforms in the world.

WeChat is growing so fast in fact that they added 700 000 new users onto the platform by executing a deal with 1 mobile carrier in China in 1 province. The Weixin Woka deal  (Weixin is the Chinese name for WeChat) gives users a choice of three different talktime and messaging packages ranging in price from RMB66 ($11) to RMB126 ($21). Users would then have to pay another RMB10 ($1.60) for 300MB of data which was increased to 500MB if users signed up during promotional period in the first 10 days. Within 22 hours 700 000 pre-orders for the deal were made in Guangdong Province where the deal is exclusively available through China Unicom.

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