Remember this: You’ll be surprised.

 

That’s how we saw it in the people who gasped in amazement at Craft Pub and Grill in Bonifacio Global City over a bunch of features in WeChat— that green icon with two overlapping speech bubbles that might’ve gone idle on your smartphone.

 

“WeChat is not only chat,” said Steve Zheng, the app’s business development vice president. That marked the beginning of a barrage of features that stretched the capabilities of mobile messaging but still localized for the country.

 

“The Philippines is one of the most hypersocial countries,” Zheng said. Pinoys enjoy conversations, and WeChat calibrated its features around that.

 

“Every day, you will be meeting people … [With WeChat] you can tap, add; no need for numbers,” Zheng said. You thus avoid giving phone numbers to people with bad intentions, through scanning the other person’s QR code or finding people nearby—up until one kilometer away—in the Discover menu.

 

Innovations

 

Two other innovations impressed many of the guests. Shake, also under Discover, helps you find people simultaneously shaking their phones— one shake picked up a user from 7,888 kilometers away. Meanwhile, the first-in-class Friend Radar helps find you other WeChat users.

 

Video calls are also high-definition and, most importantly, free. Zheng said this was a “very necessary feature” for overseas Filipino workers who tap the Internet to check on their relatives back home.

 

“There’s no need for cables, USBs and other things,” Zheng said. Filipinos abroad can now send an unlimited number of photos via the file-sharing function. They can also use Philippine expressions on chat with Juan Chatter, which uses 16 Filipino street slangs as funny stickers. Try “push mo yan,” “wagi” and “waley.” They are “very cute,” Zheng said.

 

Besides free calls, WeChat also has the Hold to Talk function, which sends sound bytes. The Walkie Talkie function can host up to 40 friends, so imagine finding your way through Makati for the first time, confident that up to 40 friends will virtually be with you.

 

“In some countries, you can see WeChat is a fashion signature,” Zheng said, citing Hong Kong as an example.

 

Privacy

 

In China, it had surpassed Weibo as the social media of choice. With the censorship in that country, the app’s intimate channels ensure more privacy.

 

The app looks to those examples as it attempts to appeal to Filipinos. It has been forging partnerships with local products.

 

Partners Lazada and ZaloraPH give WeChat users updates on sales and promos. It is also FHM’s first partner in the mobile platform, with the magazine announcing on July 1 that app users will get exclusive updates about its featured models and other “for-him” stuff.

 

Partner brands and personalities get official accounts through which they can broadcast their activities; and users can receive prize-winning scratch cards.

 

“This is the kind of bridge we want to build … We want to make a bridge to different merchants,” said Zheng, promising that WeChat will continue to blow the minds of Pinoys.

 

He said the app might one day be the Filipinos’ mode to pay bills and tickets for flights and even the movies.

 

In the meantime, he vouched his confidence on the product: “If you try it, you will love it.”