Jimmy Zhou is a New Yorker; his mother, in her seventies, moved to the United States from Dongguan, China, in 1982, a few years before he was born. Out of all the messaging apps to choose from, there’s only one his mother feels comfortable using—in fact, it’s the only app she knows how to use.
US-owned messaging apps, including WhatsApp and Signal, are banned in China, so for Zhou’s mother, WeChat—a social messaging and payments platform owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent—has become a lifeline. The app has around 19 million daily active users in the US. Many of them, like Zhou’s mother,
→ Continue reading at WIRED
