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Have you extensively compared these yourself? They're engineered in different ways to suit different tastes but unilaterally proclaiming Wechat worse than Whatsapp is tricky when there's a ton more stuff running through Wechat and it's kind of developed its own niche.
Yes I've used wechat and it's extremely scuffed. The fact that there's a mobile wallet on there has zero bearing on the messaging functionality. And "mini-apps" that westerners gush about are just webviews with an injected payment api.
Western messaging apps- imessage, whatsapp, telegram, discord, etc all have tons of polish on their mobile apps.
What should also be telling is that literally zero people use wechat who don't also have someone currently residing in the PRC in their circle. If wechat was good, there would at least be a community somewhere that uses it.
It being a pain in the ass to verify your account as not a spammer as a foreigner is part of that, which admittedly might be a chicken and the egg situation of 'It's hard to verify since there's no large independent foreign userbase and it's hard to have a large foreign userbase when you get kicked off for not verifying'
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