If your Chinese friends don’t have WeChat, another popular choice is QQ. Made by Tencent, this app boasts a huge range of features: it’s much more than a messaging app.
Users can write microblogs a la Twitter, watch movies, play games, make voice and video calls, and write text messages. As one of the most popular messaging apps in the world, QQ has a huge userbase in China and among the Chinese diaspora around the world.
While it may not be quite as common as WeChat, it’s a multifaceted service that can make staying in touch with and planning activities easy. As with WeChat, government surveillance is prevalent, so the same warning applies to QQ as to WeChat.