China Mobile ends decade of failure against WeChat: iMessage-like Feixin to shut down after struggling in smartphone era

China Mobile announced that it would stop providing service for Feixin by the end of September, ending what was once a popular alternative to SMS

Feixin remained closed to rival networks for a year after Tencent launched WeChat, and China Mobile was loath to promote a service that ate into SMS profits

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A sign of China Mobile seen on a street in Shanghai on January 4, 2022. Photo: Reuters

Published: 5:30pm, 25 Jul 2022

China Mobile is shutting down its iMessage-style system that once dominated mobile messaging on the network, putting an end to a decade of failure to adapt to China’s smartphone era, where people live much of their digital lives inside Tencent Holdings’ WeChat.

When initially launched in 2007 by China Mobile, one of the country’s three main state-owned telecoms carriers, the Feixin messaging service took the country by storm. Yet many of its most innovative features, such as being able to text from computers, were adopted a few years later by WeChat, and China Mobile was slow to react.

Feixin will “stop providing services from September 30, after which users won’t be able to log in and use the service”, China Mobile announced on its website on July 15, adding that it would delete user information after an unspecified period of time.

The telecoms operator did not give a reason for shutting the app down, but said it was “sorry for the inconvenience”.

At its height, Feixin – branded as Hefeixin, Fetion or Femoo at different times – had as many as 90 million active users in 2013, according to state-run media Beijing Business Today. Two years later, active users of the service had fallen 20 per cent.