Obviously not related to Shanghai but this is the only community where I think there might be people that would know the answer. It just doesn’t make any sense to me why they’d do this?
They are probably aiming at a complete cutoff between the mainland version and an “international” version. Kind of like tiktok and douyin. WeChat will probably become the “international” version, while if you have an account with a mainland number it’s gonna be 微信 but if your phone/app language is set to English it’s just going to display the pinyin of 微信.
EDIT: Just to add something: the necessity of such a change has to do with different rules and laws concerning storage and usage of user data. For example: the user data collected by apps in the mainland has to physically, geographically, remain within mainland borders. Which means you can’t store the data of a user from Shanghai on a server in Japan or the US.
Mine switched to Weixin some months back. I’m on an iPhone, bought in China, system language English with a Chinese mobile number.
My family back in the USA says their apps all still say WeChat (it’s our main form of communication)
It didn’t. Mine didn’t anyway. I think if you’re using the Chinese version (registered with a Chinese phone number and this your data is stored on Chinese servers) it calls itself Weixin. If you use a foreign phone number you data is stored on servers in Singapore or somewhere like that and the app calls itself WeChat.
weixin = inside china
wechat = outside of china.
probably different level of censorship.
Biggest chat app in China having an English name ? When English words are becoming pariah ?
The one on my laptop is Weixin with its menu in Chinese. The one one my mobile is in English. For one of the health codes (I lost count) I was alerted that my wechat needs to be updated. Tried doing it. Did not work. Although I am getting regular update alerts for a bunch of apps, which then they then get update. I reckon the update attempt which doesn’t work out is to convert to Weixin. Just a layman’s guess.
It’s always been Weixin in China and wechat outside of China since I’ve used it (6 years)
They didn’t change the name.
There are two “mirrored” apps. Wechat for outside China, weixin for inside.
Same with Tiktok / Douyin.
For those in China, are you finding there are less and less posts nowadays on there?
Because Xi Fuckwit (not the proper noun capitals) hates English. He has begun reforming Beijing to remove English signage. It’s all in effort to distance from the west.
Yeah fwiw I’m in the US and created my wechat account with a US number, there are no updates pending (on ios) and it still says wechat
Yeah same. On Android though. It happened when I updated the app.
I just noticed that the watch which I bought here in China (series 4) still shows the name WeChat in the watchOS interface.
I had WeChat - registered with a US # but then changed to a CN #. Then it asked to update a few months ago and now all of a sudden I have weixin. Given the amount of data China has on me already I don’t care that much, but I felt tricked.
If you have no idea, don’t comment.
They are separating Chinese users from internationals and while for now the apps are identical, they are already segregating everything in the backend.
I doubt they’ll remove the possibility to talk to foreign registered accounts, but you can be certain they’ll add layers of observation.
Well if that’s the case I have no idea about the name change and it seems it’s not related with the separation. But that will happen at some point.
EDIT: I found this article that says almost the same thing that I did in my comment above:
The thing might be related to the timing. Having a firing number eventually will turn your Weixin into WeChat.
EDIT2: *foreign number
Probably was during an automatic update as I have it set to do that.
Just right now noticed that it’s still WeChat on the iPhone lock screen notifications also.
Oh, and the name of the app (under the icon but hidden I have it on the pinned bar) is still WeChat. Search for Weixin in the app store and it shows the WeChat app.
So all in all it seems an internal interface variable triggered by being in China and/or with a China mobile number.
Oh yeah I wasn’t contradicting you (or not trying to anyway), just providing supplementary info haha