WeChat officially launched in India

Post a soft-launch last year, WeChat has been officially launched in India in an event in Mumbai today. The app by China’s Tencent International already boasts of being one of the most downloaded apps on Android as well as iOS in India.

Announcing Bollywood stars Parineeti Chopra and Varun Dhawan as brand ambassadors, WeChat also launched its brand campaign in the country. The cross-platform messaging app is currently the top downloaded free app from Apple’s App Store in India. As far as Android goes, WeChat is the second in the list of free communication apps in the Google Play Store and fifth overall. The company has said that its daily users have grown five fold in the past one month alone.

The app puts together a lot of features for a cross-platform messaging app

WeChat comes with a number of features like “Hold-To-Talk” and “Moments”, which makes it slightly different from other cross-platform messaging apps. The “Hold-To-Talk” feature lets you send voice messages to your friends with the touch of a button.

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Using “Moments”, you will be able to post images and text in order to share it with selected friends in a safe manner. Most interestingly, WeChat has announced “Official Accounts”, a feature using which brands and companies can interact with their users on this platform. Companies like Big Bazaar, Yahoo! Cricket and Café Coffee Day are some that have already signed up for official accounts, says WeChat.

The app is available on major platforms like iOS, Android, Symbian and Windows Phone. WeChat was recently made available to BlackBerry phones as well.