Around 12:00 today (my guess — I exploited the trick before that, then it suddenly stopped working), WeChat did a silent hotfix: video ads now work for accounts using non-+86 phone numbers.
To clarify: WeChat and WeiXin are the same app, same APK — the only difference is the phone number you used to register. If your account uses a non-mainland China number (like +1, +44, etc), it’s treated as a “WeChat” account, not “WeiXin”.
Before this update, WeChat accounts couldn’t play video ads at all. When that happened, some games would fall back to the “share instead of ad” logic — they’d pop up a share dialog when the ad failed to load. But here’s the trick: WeChat returns the same callback data whether you share or cancel, so these games would just give you the reward anyway, even if you didn’t actually share.
There were two kinds of games: 1. Games that offered a fallback (share instead of ad) — most of the popular ones. These could be exploited by canceling the share. 2. Games that strictly required watching an ad — if the ad couldn’t load, no reward at all. For those, having a WeChat account was worse than a mainland one.
Now that WeChat accounts can load ads, the fallback no longer triggers. So the “cancel share and still get reward” trick is gone. You’ll have to actually watch the ad now.
