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
Alibaba. Meituan. Tencent. SHEIN.
What is the operating logic behind China’s most dominant digital platforms — and what does it mean for business in South-east Asia?
Online Masterclass | Prof Weiming Zhu at HKU Business School | 4 June | 14:00–16:00 HKT
Alibaba. Meituan. Tencent. SHEIN.
What is the operating logic behind China’s most dominant digital platforms — and what does it mean for business in South-east Asia?
Online Masterclass | Prof Weiming Zhu at HKU Business School | 4 June | 14:00–16:00 HKT
🪄 Introducing Ardot, Tencent's AI-native design agent platform.
Ardot covers the entire UI/UX workflow:
→ Design to code in one click. Work with CodeBuddy via MCP & Workbuddy, Cursor, Claude Code via MCP IDE.
→ Prompt to design. Describe it or drop an image. Get a fully editable UI draft back.
→ Edit anything. Select an element, describe the change, done.
→ Import from Figma. Full fidelity, zero migration cost.
→ Real-time collaboration. Comments, version diffs, team permissions built in.
What should AI generate in order to improve itself?
Not just more questions, traces, or answers.
We believe it should learn to generate environments.
Excited to share my first work after joining Tencent Hunyuan LLM. We study how models can construct reusable, verifiable environments that provide stable training signals for self-improvement.
This is only a first feasibility step, but we see environment construction as a necessary path toward truly self-improving AI.
Paper:
IMO, it’s very bullish for Tencent $TCEHY .
People will spend more time on the Tencent ecosystem. Btw, tencent’s WeChat Channels(視頻號) has improved DAU/MAU recently