Most people in my circle are using iPhones. It's not an issue for me. Although I'm unique in my group as I carry two phones (iPhone and Pixel).

FaceTime and iMessage work fine in China without VPN. For my customers in Europe and USA who have trouble with WeChat, iMessage and FaceTime are our fallback app.

WeChat, on the other hand, does not like non-Chinese IPs, speeds slow down. If I am using my VPN and someone calls (or worse yet, video calls) me on WeChat, I often have to turn off my VPN to get better internet speeds.

And when I'm in the US or Germany, on wifi, sending big files or videos by WeChat takes a long time. Still usable, just slow.

Turns out it was something strange on my phone. After closing everything and starting it up again it worked. Strange as it had rebooted only hours earlier due to an update.

That happens to me quite a bit after iphone updates. I close the app on my phone and PC, open the phone app and then the laptop and it works fine. For whatever reason, this can even occur after iphone updates which are not for wechat.

Having to teach my girlfriends parents how to use a VPN is not going to be fun...

I'm hopeful that you (and me) won't have to educate our elders on VPN. My gut tells me that this issue is now "yesterday's news".

But, if push comes to shove, I will simply migrate to a different platform instead of attempting to walk mom through the VPN drill. Even if we were to get it set up properly (probably with the assistance of someone local to her), she lacks the patience to deal with customer support when things go bad.

iPhone just work. My dad was a non-believer until he tried. He hasn't looked back since. Since it's been confirmed that iMessage and FaceTime works in China, this is a no-brainer.

TikTok in the US might be a kids thing, but TikTok in China is huge outside of the tier 1 cities. WeChat is getting steamrolled and you know they're worried because they've tried multiple times to duplicate TikTok within WeChat but it's been a failure every single time. WeChat duplicating TikTok is pretty much the same as Microsoft/Google trying to duplicate Facebook, in vain.

Facebook and Instagram is looking to copy some of Tiktok's features.

It's never going to work. You have to throw away the existing Social connections if you want this thing to succeed.

In theory, it could work, but I like your MS example. In light of the fact that Tencent hasn't pulled this off yet, I give long odds to FB during the medium term.

Hi, all. It appears that Tencent has seriously upped its censorship recently. I still want to keep our group active because it remains an incredibly useful resource for anyone who finds themselves in a jam or simply wants restaurant suggestions (fbm might be similar in terms of functionality, but it isn't widely used here). That having been said, posts that pertain to taboo topics (growing list) will not be seen by others. As such, if we want to talk about things like Vs, it's imperative that we develop a new lingo. This presumably isn't so important for one-to-one conversations, but is for largish groups and moments if you have a lot of friends.

Slightly off topic, but I would like to receive visual but not sound notifications from Wechat of new messages. I haven't found any way to do it. When I had sound messages activated. I have OnePlus6 Android phone and a Samsung tablet. I am in the US and when the sound notifications on Wechat were activated I would be getting messages at times such as 2 a.m., which was very annoying.

If the in-app WeChat settings aren't cutting it for you, go play around in your operating system settings:
Settings > Apps & notifications > App info > WeChat > App notifications > (choose a category) > Importance > Medium: No sound

And if it's night time messages that are the issue, go to Me, Settings, do not disturb, turn on the toggle switch, and specify the hours when you don't want any notifications.