The 2 billion is the number of devices with the Play Store. Android devices in China do not have Google Play Store or Services on them. So devices in China do not factor into this number.
Twitter is different from facebook.Snap is not and will never be a facebook alternative(vice versa).Because social network is not just client software but relationships.You can easily replace facebook/whatsapp with snapchat or whatever you like,but how do you persuade your friends and relatives to do that?If none of your friends use the alternatives,you have to reuse facebook.
If you take a look at what wechat has done in china,you will get the answer.More and more people there are shopping,making payments via wechat pay instead of alipay,watching news through wechat news instead of other news sites,searching keywords through wechat search instead of baidu and doing almost everything in wechat.WeChat is a growing threat to other IT companies in china.In fact,alibaba has already tried several times to make a successful messaging platform but fails repeatedly(just like Google's messaging mess). If facebook move in WeChat's direction,it will be a huge threat to amazon.Please excuse for my bad English as i am not a native speaker.
Can Facebook and other US tech companies move in WeChat's direction successfully, in the West? Why did WeChat take off as such an everything-application in China? Do the same necessary motivations and trends exist elsewhere?
I'd speculate not, at least not in the US. Here, more people have different types of computers (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones, set-top boxes) which are all united mainly by Web browsers / technologies. The Web is naturally - or at least, has been historically - more open and less conducive to walled gardens. Consequently, I think US consumers are used to the experience of getting news from (for example) the Washington Post, shopping on Amazon, and checking email on GMail, while navigating between these sites without too much hassle. This experience has largely been replicated on mobile devices, at least for me, despite the best efforts of Facebook and others to keep me locked in their app outside of mobile Chrome and Safari.
Since the Chinese government won't allow strong foreign competitors to penetrate their domestic market, I have to assume that Facebook, Google, and so forth are targeting other countries with these all-in-one messaging apps. Perhaps India would most resemble China's mobile-dominated market?
The environment is not the same as China, both in terms of the infrastructure and people's expectations and mentalities.
Tencent is what it is because competition is banned. China's "internet" is more like AOL from the early 90s, with network performance from the early 2000s at best. Nobody is going to be able to move in WeChat's direction because other governments aren't willing to erect massive censorship infrastructure to kill competition.
Exactly this. WeChat is an example of what Amazon can possibly do that no other US company is remotely capable of.
I was going to say I can imagine an app that combines FB Messenger, Yelp, Travelocity, OpenTable, GrubHub, and Uber. But WeChat already has all these things (either via companies they own or via partnerships).
Amazon also has Prime, so they can offer millions of subscribers incentives to prime the AnyTime pump.
