In a bid to lure more customers, WeChat, the text and voice communications service, has recently announced that it will offer 1GB of free cloud storage to enable customers to save their media files and important documents.

The WeChat service was developed by Chinese firm Tencent in January 2011. The app has received a lot of popularity as it lets users to instantly send text messages, photos, videos as well as voice notes to recipients.

UK-based third party research firm Global Web Index says that WeChat is widely used in developing countries such as India. Reports suggest that around 41.8 percent smartphone users in India use WeChat. In India, WeChat was also the second most downloaded app on iOS in 2013.

"The ‘Favorite Message with 1GB cloud storage' feature enables users to save their favorite memories in the form of texts, videos and picture format without having to compromise on their device space and, also enables them to access these with just one touch whenever they want," says Nilay Arora, VP Marketing and Business Development, Tencent India.

WeChat is also available on major operating systems such as Android, iOS, BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone and more. The messaging service also attracts customers who want to use app in their own language as it supports English, traditional/simplified Chinese, Indonesian, Hindi, Thai, Spanish and many more languages. The app is also supported on Wi-Fi as well as 4G, 3G, and 2G networks.

The announcement comes as good news for customers who do not have a lot of free memory on their handsets or customers who do not want to use their handset memory. These customers will now get an alternative to save music, pictures and more on cloud storage and access them whenever they want.
WeChat is not the only messaging service to offer cloud storage to its customers. BlackBerry Messenger service, commonly known as BBM, is one of the major competitors of WeChat and is still regarded as one of the major messaging service in the industry. BBM also allows Dropbox integration that enables customers to share files directly from the app.

WeChat has millions of customers worldwide who are using the service on a daily basis. The company will hope that the throwing away free cloud storage of 1GB will be able to attract more customers globally in the near term.