Tencent QQ (), also known as QQ, is an

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and tri ...

software service and

web portal A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayi ...

developed by the Chinese technology company

Tencent Tencent Holdings Ltd. () is a Chinese multinational technology and entertainment conglomerate and holding company headquartered in Shenzhen. It is one of the highest grossing multimedia companies in the world based on revenue. It is also the wo ...

. QQ offers services that provide online social games,

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspe ...

shopping Shopping is an activity in which a customer browses the available goods or services presented by one or more retailers with the potential intent to purchase a suitable selection of them. A typology of shopper types has been developed by scho ...

microblogging Microblogging is a form of social network that permits only short posts. They "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links",. Retrieved June 5, 2014 which may be the major reason for ...

, movies, and group and voice chat software. As of March 2022, there were 563.8 million monthly active QQ accounts.

History

Tencent QQ was first released in China in February 1999 under the name of OICQ ("Open ICQ", a reference to the early IM service ICQ). After the threat of a

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from ot ...

infringement lawsuit by the

AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. ...

-owned ICQ, the product's name was changed to QQ (with "Q" and "QQ" used to imply "cute"). The software inherited existing functions from ICQ, and additional features such as software skins, people's images, and emoticons. QQ was first released as a " network paging" real-time communications service. Other features were later added, such as

chatroom The term chat room, or chatroom (and sometimes group chat; abbreviated as GC), is primarily used to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. The term can thus mean any technology, ranging from r ...

s, games, personal avatars (similar to "Meego" in MSN), online storage, and Internet dating services. The official client runs on

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

and a beta public version was launched for

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lap ...

version 10.4.9 or newer. Formerly, two web versions, WebQQ (full version) and WebQQ Mini (Lite version), which made use of

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Gree ...

, were available. Development, support, and availability of WebQQ Mini, however, has since been discontinued. On 31 July 2008, Tencent released an official client for Linux, but this has not been made compatible with the Windows version and it is not capable of

voice chat Voice chat is telecommunication via voice over IP technologies—especially when those technologies are used among players in multiplayer online games. Users might use either a VoIP engine system that is built into the game, or a separate p ...

. In response to competition with other instant messengers, such as

Windows Live Messenger MSN Messenger (also known colloquially simply as "Messenger"), later rebranded as Windows Live Messenger, was a cross-platform instant-messaging client developed by Microsoft. It connected to the Microsoft Messenger service and, in later versio ...

, Tencent released Tencent Messenger, which is aimed at businesses. Tencent QQ holds the

Guinness World Record ''Guinness World Records'', known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as ''The Guinness Book of Records'' and in previous United States editions as ''The Guinness Book of World Records'', is a reference book published annually, listing world ...

for the highest number of simultaneous online users on an instant messaging program with 210,212,085 users online on July 3, 2014.

Membership

In 2002, Tencent stopped its free membership registration, requiring all new members to pay a fee. In 2003, however, this decision was reversed due to pressure from other instant messaging services such as

and Sina UC. Tencent currently offers a premium membership scheme, where premium members enjoy features such as QQ mobile, ringtone downloads, and SMS sending/receiving. In addition, Tencent offers "Diamond" level memberships. Currently, there are seven diamond schemes available: * Red for the QQ Show service which features some superficial abilities such as having a colored account name. * Yellow to obtain extra storage and decorations in

Qzone Qzone () is a social networking website based in China which was created by Tencent in 2005. It allows users to write blogs, keep diaries, send photos, listen to music, and watch videos. Users can set their Qzone background and select accessori ...

—a blog service. * Blue to obtain special abilities in the game-plays of QQ games. * Purple for obtaining special abilities in games including QQ Speed, QQ Nana, and QQ Tang * Pink for having different boosts in the pet-raising game called QQ Pet. * Green for using QQ music—a service for users to stream music online. * VIP for having extra features in the chat client such as removing advertisements * Black for gaining benefits related to DNF ( Dungeon & Fighter), a multiplayer PC beat 'em up video game.

QQ Coin

The QQ Coin is a

virtual currency Virtual currency, or virtual money, is a digital currency that is largely unregulated and issued and usually controlled by its developers and used and accepted electronically among the members of a specific virtual community. In 2014, the Europ ...

used by QQ users to "purchase" QQ related items for their

avatar Avatar (, ; ), is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means "descent". It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, goddess or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appear ...

and

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in Reverse ...

. QQ Coins are obtained either by purchase (one coin for one RMB) or by using the mobile phone service. Due to the popularity of QQ among young people in China, QQ Coins are accepted by online vendors in exchange for "real" merchandise such as small gifts. This has raised concerns of replacing (and thus "inflating") real currency in these transactions. The

People's Bank of China The People's Bank of China (officially PBC or informally PBOC; ) is the central bank of the People's Republic of China, responsible for carrying out monetary policy and regulation of financial institutions in mainland China, as determined by ...

, China's central bank, tried to crack down on QQ Coins due to people using QQ Coins in exchange for real world goods. However, this only caused the value of QQ coins to rise as more and more third-party vendors started to accept them. Tencent claims the QQ Coin is a mere regular commodity, and is, therefore, not a currency.

Q Zone

Qzone is a social networking website based in China which was created by Tencent in 2005. Q Zone is a personal blog for QQ users. It can be set as a public page or a private friend-only page. Users can upload diaries and share photos.

QQ International

Windows

In 2009, QQ began to expand its services internationally with its QQ International client for Windows distributed through a dedicated English-language portal. QQ International offers non-Mandarin speakers the opportunity to use most of the features of its Chinese counterpart to get in touch with other QQ users via chat, VoIP, and video calls, and it provides a non-Mandarin interface to access

, Tencent's social network. The client supports English, French, Spanish, German, Korean, Japanese and Traditional Chinese. One of the main features of QQ International is the optional and automatic

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates ...

in all chats.

Android

An Android version of QQ International was released in September 2013. The client's interface is in English, French, Spanish, German, Korean, Japanese and Traditional Chinese. In addition to text messaging, users can send each other images, videos, and audio media messages. Moreover, users can share multimedia content with all contacts through the client's

interface. The live translation feature is available for all incoming messages and supports up to 18 languages.

iOS

QQ International for iPhone and iOS devices was released at the end of 2013, fully equivalent to its Android counterpart.

Partnerships

In India, Tencent has partnered with ibibo to bring services such as chat, mail and game to the developing Indian internet sphere. In Vietnam, Tencent has struck a deal with

VinaGame VNG Corporation (VNG) is a technology company, founded in 2004, specializing in digital content and online entertainment, social networking, and e-commerce. It focuses on four main businesses, including online games, platforms, digital payments ...

to bring the QQ Casual Gaming portal as well as the QQ Messenger as an addition to the already thriving Vietnamese gaming communities. In the United States, Tencent has partnered with

to bring QQ Games as a contender in the US social gaming market. Launched in 2007, QQ Games came bundled with the AIM installer, and competed with AOL's own games.com to provide a gaming experience for the AIM user base.

Web QQ

Tencent launched its web-based QQ formally on 15 September 2009, the latest version of which being 3.0. Rather than solely a web-based IM, WebQQ 3.0 functions more like its own operating system, with a desktop in which web applications can be added.

Social network website

In 2009, Tencent launched Xiaoyou (校友, 'schoolmate'), its first social network website. In mid-2010, Tencent changed direction and replaced Xiaoyou with Pengyou (朋友, 'friends'), trying to establish a more widespread network, to which extant QQ users could be easily redirected, hence giving Pengyou a major advantage over its competitors. Tencent's social network

is linked to in the International and native versions of QQ.

Open source and cross-platform clients

Using

reverse engineering Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompli ...

, open source

communities A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, to ...

have come to understand the QQ protocol better and have attempted to implement client core libraries compatible with more user-friendly clients, free of advertisements. Most of these clients are cross-platform, so they are usable on operating systems which the official client does not support. However, these implementations had only a subset of functions of the official client and therefore were limited in features. Furthermore, QQ's parent company, Tencent, has over successive versions modified the QQ protocol to the extent that it can no longer be supported by most, and perhaps any, of the third-party implementations that were successful in the past (some of which are listed below). As of 2009, none of the developers of third-party clients have publicized any plans to restore QQ support. *

Pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...

, an open source cross-platform multiprotocol client, with third-party plugin * Adium, an open source OS X client, with third-party plugin built on top of libqq-pidgin *

Kopete Kopete is a multi-protocol, free software instant messaging client released as part of the KDE Software Compilation. Although it can run in numerous environments, it was designed for and integrates with the KDE Plasma Workspaces. Kopete was star ...

, an open source multiprotocol client designed for KDE ** Note: Kopete, old versions of Pidgin, and any other client whose QQ support was based on libpurple no longer supports QQ as of May 2011 *

Miranda NG Miranda NG is an open-source multiprotocol instant messaging application, designed for Microsoft Windows. Miranda NG is free software distributed under the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later. History In May 2012 Miranda IM was forked to Miranda NG (New Ge ...

, an open source multiprotocol client, designed for

, with MirandaQQ2 plugin. * Eva

Merchandise

Tencent has taken advantage of the popularity of the QQ brand and has set up many Q-Gen stores selling QQ branded merchandise such as bags, watches, clothing as well as toy penguins.

Related characteristics

* The accounts of QQ are purely a combination of numbers. The account numbers provided for the registered users are selected randomly by the system user registration. In 1995, the registered QQ accounts had only 5 digits, while currently, the digital numbers used for QQ accounts has reached 12. The first QQ number is held by Ma Huateng and his account number is 10001. * The membership of a QQ account normally lasts for a month. When this membership is overdue and has not been renewed, the said account will be deactivated. * In relation to calculating "QQ Age", being logged in for 2 full hours would be considered as one full day. Thus, being logged in to QQ for around 700 hours would make the age increase by 1 year. In the 2012 version of QQ, users can see the age on the personal information page. * In 2004, Tencent launched QQ hierarchy which shows the level of a registered member. At the very beginning, this hierarchy was solely based on the hours a member spent in QQ. Hence, the longer the member stayed, the higher level he can aim. These results, however, were criticized as people tend to waste electrical energy due to longer hours of stay on the site. Therefore, Tencent changed the basis from an hour unit to a daily unit due to the involvement of several departments.

Controversies and criticisms

Coral QQ

Coral QQ, a modification of Tencent QQ, is another add-on for the software, providing free access to some of the services and blocking Tencent's advertisements. In 2006, Tencent filed a copyright lawsuit against Chen Shoufu (aka Soft), the author of Coral QQ, after his distribution of a modified Tencent QQ was ruled illegal. Chen then published his modification as a separate add-on. On 16 August 2007, Chen was detained again for allegedly making profits off of his ad-blocking add-on. The case resulted in a three-year prison sentence for Shoufu.

Dispute with Qihoo 360

In 2010, Chinese anti-virus company,

Qihoo 360 Qihoo 360 (; approximate pronunciation CHEE-hoo), full name 360 Security Technology Inc., is a Chinese internet security company that has developed the antivirus software programs 360 Safeguard and 360 Mobile Safe, the Web browser 360 Secure Br ...

, analyzed the QQ protocol and accused QQ of automatically scanning users' computers and uploading their personal information to QQ's servers without the users' consent. In response, Tencent called 360 a

malware Malware (a portmanteau for ''malicious software'') is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client, or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, depr ...

and denied users of installing 360 access to some of the QQ's services. The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information reprimanded both companies for "improper competition" and ordered them to come to an agreement.

Government surveillance

Some observers have criticized QQ's compliance in the Chinese government's Internet surveillance and censorship. A 2013 report by

Reporters Without Borders Reporters Without Borders (RWB; french: Reporters sans frontières; RSF) is an international non-profit and non-governmental organization with the stated aim of safeguarding the right to freedom of information. It describes its advocacy as found ...

specifically mentioned QQ as allowing authorities to monitor online conversations for keywords or phrases and track participants by their user number.

Adware controversy

The Chinese version of QQ makes use of embedded advertisements. Older versions of the client have been branded as malicious

adware Adware, often called advertising-supported software by its developers, is software that generates revenue for its developer by automatically generating online advertisements in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the ...

by some antivirus and anti-spyware vendors. Both the Chinese and International versions of QQ had been tested in 2013. Currently it is identified as malware by DrWeb, Zillya, NANO-Antivirus, and VBA32 give positive results, most of which identify it as a trojan.

Security

On March 6, 2015, QQ scored 2 out of 7 points on the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ...

's secure messaging scorecard. It received points for having communications encrypted in transit and for having a recent independent security audit. It lost points because communications are not

end-to-end encrypted End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers – including telecom providers, Internet providers, malicious actors, and eve ...

, users can't verify contacts' identities, past messages are not secure if the encryption keys are stolen (i.e. the service does not provide forward secrecy), the code is not open to independent review (i.e. the code is not

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

), and the security design is not properly documented.