Read the passage below and check your comprehension by answering the following questions. Then “submit” your work.
For more than five hundred million people, one app has become the “go to” mobile phone app. Is it Google Search? YouTube? Facebook Messenger? No, it’s called WeChat, and in China it is the primary way to send text messages as well as photos and videos (Pierce, 2015). In the United States, messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct are becoming increasingly popular, but most text messaging is still primarily done using SMS (Short Message Service) through a person’s mobile phone number. In other parts of the world, however, mobile phone services often do not offer unlimited texting as part of the costs of a data plan. So users turn to data-frugal internet-based mobile apps that accomplish the same messaging functions, and often much more. In Europe, for example, most people use WhatsApp (Goodwin, 2016). In addition to the cost savings, messaging apps like WhatsApp (now owned by Facebook) offer a much less cumbersome way to send photos and video, make it easy to create memes and graphics, and are integrated with social media apps. Of course, in order for these messaging programs to be useful, the people you wish to contact also need to be using the same apps.
For users of China’s WeChat, easy messaging and social media use are just the beginning. WeChat is many apps within an app—it is used for everything from ordering dinner to hailing a taxi to playing video games to paying bills. “You can, for all intents and purposes, live your entire life within WeChat” (Pierce, 2015). WeChat has now also made huge strides in Africa, where many people’s first use of the internet will be on mobile phones. According to Brett Loubser, the head of WeChat Africa, “They’ve missed the entire desktop, PC, laptop, whatever thing, and because of that, I think we’re seeing innovation come out of Africa from a mobile perspective that is just leagues ahead of anywhere else on earth really” (van den Heever, 2016).