WeChat, the ubiquitous messaging app, is being used for an ever longer period of time and is growing into a lifestyle choice embedded into daily activities and interactions, a new survey has found.

In 2016, one-third of WeChat's 889 million monthly active users spent a solid four hours or more per day on the mobile chatting tool, twice that of a year ago, according to Penguin Intelligence, a research arm of WeChat's developer Tencent Holdings.

The average daily time spent is also up slightly, now at 66 minutes, surpassing that of Facebook's average 50 minutes recorded last year.