MiTalk

~ the goodbye ~

mitalk's ten years overlap almost exactly with my own messaging life, but on the wrong continent. while it was fighting wechat for china, i was on msn and then whatsapp in turkey, and the chinese messenger wars never touched me. to be honest. i knew xiaomi as a phone brand years later, not as the company that once tried to build a chat app. that whole battle happened behind the great firewall, in an app store i never opened.

lei jun founded xiaomi in 2010 and, seeing an opening in mobile chat, released mitalk for android on 10 december that year. wechat was born on 21 january 2011, one month behind. mitalk had the head start and could not keep it. by may 2012 lei jun said in public that wechat had beaten his app, a rare thing for a founder to admit while the product was still running.

after that it drifted. it kept a base in the tens of millions but stopped mattering, and xiaomi let it sit. in january 2021 the company said mitalk would close "due to business changes", froze new registration on 1 february, and switched the servers off at noon on 19 february 2021. users were told to export their own chat history first, because after the shutdown nothing could be pulled back.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

for about a year and a half mitalk was genuinely ahead. it launched before wechat and it had xiaomi's growing phone base to lean on. it looked like the app that would own chinese mobile chat. the problem was that tencent already owned qq on the desktop and could pour hundreds of millions of existing users straight into wechat. a head start means nothing when your rival owns the whole social graph you need.

~ what really happened ~

the shutdown itself was quiet and total. no drama, just a legacy app being retired by a company that had moved on to phones and appliances. the strange footnote is that eight days after killing mitalk, xiaomi brought the name back as an audio chat app, a clubhouse copy for the brief 2021 moment when everyone wanted a clubhouse copy. the messenger stayed dead. only the name got reused.

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