Fetion

» see feixin.10086.cn as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

fetion was the chinese name feixin in english transliteration, launched in may 2007 by china mobile, the largest state telecom carrier on earth. the pitch was simple. send free sms from your computer to any china mobile phone while the carrier absorbed the cost, since it already owned the pipes. for a country where sms was the dominant short-form messaging layer, this was a real proposition.

by 2010 fetion claimed around 500 million registered accounts, which sounds enormous and was, but registered did not mean active. the active number topped out near 90 million in 2012. either way, this was a top-three messenger in china during a window when chinese internet was the largest single user base in the world. then tencent launched weixin in january 2011, the version of qq that ran on smartphones with no need for an sms underlay, and the category began to move.

fetion never adapted. it stayed a desktop-first, sms-tethered, carrier-locked product while wechat became the operating system of chinese daily life. china mobile rebranded the service to "he feixin" in 2016 and tried to pivot to business customers. nothing took. the service was officially retired on september 30, 2022. it sat on the chinese internet for about eleven years past its peak as a thing nobody opened.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it worked ~

you logged in with your china mobile phone number. the desktop client let you send free sms to any china mobile number, which was the killer feature in a market where carrier sms still cost money per message. you could also chat in-app with other fetion users. for a moment in 2009 and 2010, this was the way university students with a desktop pc and a parent's phone bill kept the bill down.

~ what it lost to ~

wechat was free, ran on smartphones, did voice messages, did groups, did mobile payments by 2013, and did not care which carrier you were on. fetion was free conditional on you being a china mobile customer and doing your messaging from a desktop. the moment cheap android smartphones and 3g data plans hit china, the carrier-bundled messenger lost its only structural reason to exist. wechat went from launch to 100 million users in fifteen months and never looked back.

~ the long tail ~

this product is outside my orbit. i was not a china mobile customer and the chinese internet has never been a place i can read from the inside. my reading of fetion is third-party. what is interesting from the outside is that it is one of very few western-style messengers that died at scale without leaving a community of mourners. nobody made a fan revival. the brand existed because the carrier marketed it, and when the carrier stopped, it was just gone. about half a billion accounts vanished and nobody noticed because nobody was using them anymore.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »