Zalo's Long Defense: The App Every Vietnamese Opens, but Few Stay On

[Zalo's Long Defense: The App Every Vietnamese Opens, but Few Stay On]

▍ The Make-or-Break Winter of 2012

In late 2012, VNG CEO Lê Hồng Minh wrote a blunt internal assessment: "Zalo is in an extremely fragile position. 2013 will be the decisive year."

He had reason to worry.

Zalo had only shipped its test build in August and its public version in December. The team had made a serious engineering mistake, using web architecture to build a mobile app. The product was full of bugs.

Almost no one in Vietnam believed this local team could build a chat app that beat WeChat, Viber and WhatsApp. VNG's own track record didn't help: an earlier in-house attempt called Zing Chat had already failed despite heavier investment. Only Zing MP3, a side project, had broken through to become Vietnam's top music streaming platform in three months.

There was an easier path on the table. Tencent would have been happy to let VNG distribute WeChat in Vietnam. Ready-made brand, ready-made tech, ready-made servers.

Minh said no.

▍ Why VNG Turned Tencent Down

"Distributing WeChat carries long-term brand risk and a loss of control. Building our own is harder now, but better later."

That single line is the seed of everything Zalo became.

On the surface it reads like a Vietnamese company drawing a line against a Chinese tech giant. But Minh's calculation was more practical than political. Licensing meant someone else's engine, someone else's account system, someone else's data pipeline. The day Zalo became Vietnam's WeChat reseller, every future negotiation, every price change, every extension into payments or government services would need Tencent's approval.

The "harder now" part meant Vuong Quang Khai and a small team of mostly Vietnamese engineers facing a multi-front marketing war against international giants.

Tuổi Trẻ described the VNG team at the time as having "a Don Quixote spirit" — chasing a goal that looked too big to be reasonable.

Going into 2013, almost nobody expected the Don Quixotes to survive the year.

▍ A Vietnamese Comedian, VNG's First Weapon Against the Giants

VNG's opening move in 2013 wasn't an algorithm. It was an actor.

Just before Lunar New Year, Zalo launched its first Tết voice sticker pack, featuring Hoài Linh, a household-name comedian, recording Vietnamese-style New Year greetings packed with local humor. It was the kind of asset WeChat and Viber could never buy, no matter how many features they added. They could build the same tech. They just didn't know what Vietnamese people wanted to hear from Hoài Linh on New Year's Eve.

The whole Zalo design team that year was Vietnamese — stickers, group-chat topics, friend discovery. Every design call sat closer to how Vietnamese people actually used their phones than anything an international competitor could ship.

The team built a more Vietnamese chat app, rather than a better one.

The results came faster than Minh's grim December note suggested.

On 8 January 2013, Zalo took the top spot on Vietnam's App Store, knocking WeChat off the throne. In March it crossed one million users. By May it hit two million and passed Viber and LINE. By March 2014 it was at ten million users, 120 million messages a day, and half of Vietnam's smartphone market. By February 2017 Zalo had 70 million users, roughly 75% of Vietnam's population.

That was the year the Vietnamese tech scene first believed a local product could win.

▍ From Chat App to Government Pipeline

Once an app covers three-quarters of a country, it stops being just an app.

The turning point came with COVID-19. In 2020 the Ministry of Health began sending pandemic alerts through its Zalo Official Account. By the middle of the outbreak, that channel had pushed out more than 3.5 billion notifications. That's the kind of reach only possible when almost every phone in the country has the same app installed.

Zalo also ran an AI chatbot to help people locate COVID-ready hospitals and emergency contacts. It was launched more than 10.5 million times, across all 63 provinces. Zalo Event, an in-app planner for weddings, birthdays and funerals, handled nearly 1.5 million attendees during the lockdowns.

On 6 July 2020, Minister of Information and Communications Nguyễn Mạnh Hùng personally handed Zalo a letter of commendation. That wasn't routine corporate PR. It was a signal that the government now treated Zalo as a piece of public infrastructure — when a ministry-level official publicly praises a private tech company, that company has entered the pipes.

The direction stayed the same after the pandemic. In May 2022 Zalo added end-to-end encryption. Later that year it launched eKYC identity verification, turning a chat app into an authentication layer. By the end of 2024, government bodies ran 17,273 official Zalo accounts spanning all 63 provinces. The default channel for public notices now runs through Zalo. Even VNeID, Vietnam's national digital identity app, rode this rail to 25% usage in 2025.

At that point Zalo's user base (78.3 million) had already overtaken Viettel, Vietnam's largest telecom carrier, which holds more than 50% of the mobile market.

Vietnam's telecom industry has a term for this: the pipeline trap. Customers still pay carriers for 4G data. But the messages, calls, photos and videos flowing through that data all go through Zalo. Years of carrier revenue from SMS, voice calls and photo sharing have been absorbed by one OTT platform.

Zalo didn't sit on top of telecom. It turned telecom into plumbing.

▍ Vuong Quang Khai's Product Philosophy

The person running this campaign is Vuong Quang Khai (Vương Quang Khải), VNG's executive vice president, who came back to Vietnam from the United States in 2007.

His previous major project was Zing Me, one of VNG's early social networks. It reached 10 million users in 2009 before being flattened by Facebook.

That defeat taught him three values he built Zalo around: simplicity, reliability, privacy.

He describes himself in an unusual way for a product lead: "I treat myself as Zalo's most demanding user."

That posture has earned him a lot of criticism.

The best-known example: as of 2026, Zalo still doesn't support logging into the same account on multiple devices simultaneously. The reason Khai gives is that multi-device sync would break privacy boundaries. Competitors treat it as table stakes. Khai leaves the friction in on purpose.

His privacy pledge is unusually direct: "We have not, and will not, use message content for business purposes. If we need data to train AI, we will explicitly ask for consent."

Zalo tried to go international in 2015. It failed. Khai's post-mortem was blunt: the product that wins isn't the best one, it's the one that fits Vietnamese users. From that point on, every Zalo product decision came back to one question — is this useful to Vietnamese people? If the answer wasn't clearly yes, they didn't ship.

That restraint is what the Decision Lab Q4 2022 Connected Consumer report captured: Zalo 87%, Facebook 72%, Messenger 58%, Instagram 15%. Since 2020, Zalo has held the top spot in Vietnamese messaging for more than a dozen consecutive quarters.

▍ 98% Open Rate, Third in Time Spent

In March 2026, market research firm Q&Me published its annual Vietnam mobile app report. The first headline number was striking.

The most opened app in Vietnam is Zalo, with a 98% usage rate, ahead of Facebook (91%), Messenger (88%) and TikTok (82%). Among female users, Zalo's rate is 100%. Among men it's 96%. Among adults 27 and older, 99%. This is an app Vietnamese people cannot avoid using.

But the same report had a second ranking that tells a different story.

In average total time spent, Facebook leads with 25%, TikTok follows at 19%, and Zalo comes in third at 16%.

Vietnamese users open Zalo to send a message, check a government alert, finish eKYC, or scan a QR code in ZaloPay. Then they close it and go back to scrolling Facebook and TikTok.

Zalo has built itself into a Swiss Army knife: sharp, precise, essential, unsticky.

Every temptation Khai refused — ads, dopamine loops, short-video algorithms — is exactly what Facebook and TikTok use to hold users' time. His "most demanding user" philosophy now has a two-sided result: Zalo won on reach, and lost on attention.

In 2025 the Zalo division booked revenue of VND 1.718 trillion, up 38% year-on-year, with 79.6 million monthly active users. But VNG as a whole posted its fifth straight year of losses, ending 2025 VND 326 billion in the red.

An ad-free Zalo has to pull cash out of somewhere. So Khai is pushing the app from free-only to freemium, with paid tiers unlocking advanced features — the same model ChatGPT and Zoom run on. Users are pushing back. In a VnExpress interview he admitted this is a defining trade-off: either sacrifice user experience for ad revenue, or take the harder sustainable road.

On 27 November 2025, Khai was appointed vice chairman of VNG's board for the 2025–2030 term. VNG is betting more on Zalo, not less.

▍ VNG's Next Problem

A 98% open rate is responsibility more than triumph.

The 16% time share is what Khai's years of "we won't do that" add up to.

Minh turned down Tencent in 2012 and what he got in return was a platform 100 million Vietnamese can't leave. The flip side of an app that cannot fall, is an app nobody will stay on.

VNG's problem is no longer about winning the market. It's about finding a reason to keep existing inside a market it already won.

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