Saturday, 7th March 2026
WeChat -- The Worst Chatting App Ever Made
If I had to cast a vote for the worst messaging app in human history, it would go to WeChat -- and it wouldn't even be close.
WeChat is a Chinese messaging app developed by Tencent, and the uncomfortable truth behind its dominance is simple: it doesn't succeed because it's good. It succeeds because the Chinese government has banned virtually every mainstream alternative -- WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, you name it. When the competition is legislated out of existence, there's no pressure to actually build something decent. What you get instead is a textbook example of what state-backed technology monopoly produces: an app so poorly designed it would never survive in a free market.
Let's start with the data storage model. WeChat only stores messages locally -- once a message is delivered to the recipient, it's wiped from the server after a short window. Fine in principle; local-first storage is a legitimate design choice. The problem is what comes next: there's no straightforward way to back up your own data. The only supported backup method requires the desktop WeChat app running on a computer. No computer? You simply can't back up your chat history. Your only option is a direct phone-to-phone transfer, which works until one of those phones dies or gets lost. And it gets worse. Even if you do manage to back up your data to a computer, you cannot actually read it. The backup is encrypted and bound to your WeChat account using a key that WeChat controls. You can restore it back to a phone -- that's it. You cannot open it, search it, export it, or do anything useful with it on a computer. It's your data, stored on your own machine, and you're locked out of it.
Naturally, a handful of developers reverse-engineered the encryption, extracted the decryption keys at runtime, and published open-source tools so people could access their own chat histories. Tencent's response? Lawsuits. The projects were taken down from GitHub. And then, to make matters more absurd, Tencent began forcing users to upgrade away from older versions that were more vulnerable to this kind of extraction -- yet version 3.9 still sits on their official website available for download. You install it, log in, and immediately get kicked out with a prompt telling you the version is outdated. If the version is truly unsupported, why is it still being served from your own servers? The cynicism is breathtaking.
I genuinely don't have words for the level of mediocrity on display here -- from the product decisions all the way down to the legal intimidation of developers who simply wanted access to their own messages.
So here's what I'm doing next: I'm going to explore whether the extraction methods from those now-deleted projects can be replicated for newer versions of WeChat. I'll document everything I find and, if it works, I'll post it on GitHub. I'm based in the UK, and I'm not particularly worried about a lawsuit from a company with a track record of silencing people for wanting to read their own data. This is my data. I own it. Wish me luck -- updates to follow.