Growing up in China, then moving to the States, I get asked about Superapps constantly by international friends. It sounds grand and obvious. My answer is always the same: it's not that easy!
Every superapp starts as one genuinely indispensable app. Let’s use WeChat as an example:
2011: Messaging (core chat)
2012: Moments (social timeline)
2013: WeChat Pay (payments)
2014: Red Packets (红包), arguably the single most important product moment in WeChat's history. Launched during Chinese New Year, it went viral overnight and onboarded hundreds of millions of users onto WeChat Pay in weeks. Tencent later called it a "Pearl Harbor attack" on Alibaba's Alipay dominance.
2015: WeChat Pay expanded into offline retail broadly.
2016: Enterprise WeChat
2017: Mini Programs, which allowed third-party apps to run natively inside WeChat without users downloading anything.
2020: Channels (short video, direct response to Douyin/TikTok's dominance.)
2022+: Deeper Channels integration, live commerce, search ambitions
It's the heaviest app on my phone and i'm forever grateful that it exists so i can send silly photos to my parents when I was roaming around the world.
Never forget that building the initial core product sets the foundation for everything that comes after
Grok 4.5 token volume is surging on OpenRouter, breaking into the top 10 for closed models today beating out GPT 5.6 Sol and Fable 5. Previously the most used model was Tencent’s Hy3 (free version), whose promotional period ended on July 21. It seems Grok 4.5 is seeing migration from cost conscious users since then.
Proud to share: Tencent Cloud is named a Leader and a Customer Favorite in the Forrester Wave™: Sovereign Cloud Platforms, Q2 2026 — powered by Tencent Cloud Enterprise.
Full-stack sovereignty for the AI era. 👇
After Xiao Wu, meet Xiao Liu. 🤖
Tencent Robotics X’s latest robot isn’t just learning massage moves. It’s learning the touch behind them — where to press and exactly how hard.
A custom data system captures vision, touch, and force from human demonstrations. Using reinforcement learning, Xiao Liu learns to reproduce both the trajectory and the pressure.
Getting to the right spot is one thing. Getting the pressure right is another.
My shoulders volunteer as tribute.
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They PLAY BEYOND LIMITS — watching a premier global football tournament from rainforests and remote mountains.
Three outdoor creators from Malaysia and Indonesia, in the middle of nowhere. In 4K. Zero buffering. No lag.
Play Well, with Tencent Cloud — Powering the world’s greatest moments with the world’s leading media services.
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