I use Whatsapp to text friends in the U.S. since that's what they use..WeChat is primarily used in China.

I use Whatsapp to mainly text my family back home.

I haven't heard of Weixin/Wechat yet. Will look it up. But right now I'm using Fetion (fei xin飞信）to text people in China. It's free and when the sender is online with the app and the receiver either hasn't installed the app or is offline, the person will still get the message in the form of an sms. Handy.

You still pay for apps?  Get with the times and get your iphone jailbroken, it wont hurt it and you will save some money!

i mainly use whatsapp. i do have weixin to get in touch with chinese friends though i rarely use it.

you only have to pay for whatsapp if you are using iphone, other wise you can use it for a whole year free of charge and 1 year later you will have to pay 99c to keep using it,whatsapp is more usefull if you want to contact friends back at home, and wei xin if you live in china and you wanna pick up girls heheheh, just kiddin, but my chinese friends use it for this reason

i am not likely to use any u.s. based services unless someone can guarantee that my information wont get into the hands of zealous u.s cops. i am glad that weixin exists, because if there was only whatsapp, i;d rather not chat at all then use their service

Haven't tried either.  However, I've been using Viber, a free IOS app for phone and text messages.  Fidelity is a little iffy and it has its share of drop-outs, but with ear buds, it is infinitely better than my native iPhone telco service, which happens to be China Unicom.  Check it out.

Weixin does a good job for China, I use it everyday

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@BeijingShots - I understand exactly what you mean! Isn't it great that there is NO chance that the Chinese will monitor/tap/edit/arrest you for anything you do on your phone?

At least in the US privacy is the rule rather than the exception.

Facebook is looking to buy Whatsapp, so prepare yourselves as it could be blocked in the near future.