Screenshots from Zhihu app.

Taking its "hats off to WeChat Mini Program engineers", Alipay admitted copying some models of WeChat's development files, according to an apology letter posted Friday on the third-party payment's official account on question-and-answer website Zhihu.com.

This was in a response to Fenng, who first exposed this "copying" on Sina Weibo.

By publishing time, there have been 730,000 searches for "Alipay apologized toWeChat" on Sina Weibo.

According to Hemo, a coder, who is also a user of Zhihu.com, this was Alipay's " marketing" activity to draw attention to its light apps.