On 6 August US President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning transactions related to TikTok’s developer ByteDance Ltd. and China’s WeChat mobile application…
China’s widely-popular WeChat app has been making headlines recently, alongside video-sharing social networking service TikTok, after they became the target of a newly-issued executive order from US President Donald Trump, seeking to prohibit transactions on the platform by any person or involving any property under the United States’ jurisdiction, due to cited national security concerns. The order, lobbed at the apps, echoes similar moves taken against Shenzhen-based tech giant Huawei and other Chinese firms. However, it’s worth noting that the popular texting app WeChat, which is used in China for handling a broad range of aspects of daily life, can be said to have triggered an intriguing “arms race” among American tech giants, such as Facebook, Google and Apple, writes Business Insider. The Tencent-owned Chinese messaging app WeChat, which has become embedded into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in China, launched in 2011 and was initially used to send audio and text messages as well as post pictures, or ‘Moments’. The messaging platform launched its “mini apps” feature in 2017, allowing users to access apps within it without downloading them on their phone.
