Angela Zou hardly writes text messages now. Sitting at her office desk, Zou asks her iPhone, where they should go to eat. When it buzzes seconds later, she lifts it to her ear for her friend's reply. The conversation goes back and forth through these pieces of words before they decide on the place for lunch.

Like millions of others across Asia, Zou is using WeChat, a smartphone app（应用程序）developed in China, to send voice messages, snapshots（快照）and emoticons（表情符号）to her friends. Now that its walkietalkie-style（对讲机式）messages have become everywhere, she said typing feels like hard work.
WeChat's popularity has grown quickly since it came into use in 2011. Tencent, the company that developed the app, announced in September that its users had doubled in six months to 200 million. Most users are in China, though WeChat is being used across Asia and already has users in the US and the UK.  
Historically, it has proved difficult for Chinese internet firms to develop in foreign countries. But WeChat is becoming the first Chinese social media application with the possibility to go to the whole world.
WeChat is similar to the popular US-based mobile messaging service WhatsApp, but it does more. It comes in eight languages including English, Arabic and Russian.
"I used WhatsApp before I came back to China from studying abroad and found all my friends were using WeChat," said Zou, who is 25. "Now when I want to contact someone I use WeChat first." The app's features include Look Around, which allows users to chat to strangers nearby, while Moments works like Instagram（图片分享）.
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