![]() Tony DeGennaro wrote in Dragon Social: WeChat is an all-in-one messaging app. WeChat’s penetration rate among 16-64 year olds in China was 78 percent in October 2018. There were 400 million daily active users of WeChat Mini-Programs in the first quarter of 2020). WeChat had 1.2 billion monthly active users in the first quarter of 2020 and 619.6 million average daily active users in September 2018. Research has shown that many corporation find this multi-use app crucial in maintaining their business operation and competitiveness in China. Official records from 2021 said that about 54 percent of WeChat users spent a minimum of ten to 30 minutes per day on the app. It helps them to pay bills, organize tasks, order delivery food and call a taxi. For many Chinese consumers, it is part of daily life. Since the official launch of WeChat in January 2011, Tencent’s market capitalisation has risen over tenfold. ![]() We Chat laid the foundations for stellar growth at Shenzhen-based Tencent Holdings, the tech giant behind WeChat and QQ, turning it into one of the most influential companies in China and grabbing the attention of global investors. According to the South China Morning Post: You can even book a doctor’s appointment or arrange a time slot to file for a divorce at the civil affairs authority. Since its inception in October 2010, WeChat has grown into the most popular mobile app in China with over 1 billion monthly active users who chat, read news, play games, shop, pay for meals and post their their views and pictures. The question posted to Mini Program developers and operators, as complementors, is how much they are going to invest and rely on Wechat, a already well positioned platform frenemy, if it proved to be an effective traffic driver, especially considering Wechat is a walled garden that does not usually release user data to partners.We Chat is China’s most popular messaging app. In future, it is also possible for Wechat to charge Mini Program developers for app distribution and transaction enabling. ![]() Though Zhang did not talk about his plan to directly monetize this Mini Program initiative (yet), further improved user stickiness and bigger user data would for sure help Wechat to bargain with those advertisers who want to show their ads on its social media platform. ![]() For instance, Wechat doesn’t enable Mini Program operators to broadcast messages to their light apps’ followers so that Wechat users would be less frequently disrupted when using the app to communicate with each other. For the sake of protecting this user experience, the Mini Program initiative also came with some ‘unfriendly’ limitations for app developers and operators. When facing tradeoffs between different functions provided on this Swiss-army-knife-like app, Zhang always prioritizes what made Wechat taking off – make communication between people easy. Zhang, coming from a product manager background, is renowned for his commitment to user experience centric strategy. Integrating them into Wechat in this light way will not only save Wechat’s users’ hazel but further strengthen the app’s desired position as a one-stop-solution platform for internet-based services. These Mini Programs covered many of the most frequently used internet services in China. Pathways to a Just Digital Future Watch this tech inequality series featuring scholars, practitioners, & activistsĪmong some of the early adopters of the Mini Program include Ctrip for travel bookings, JD.com for online shopping, Didi Chuxing for ordering cabs, Mobike for bicycle sharing, Meituan Food Delivery, and McDonald’s Coupons. Moreover, the speculation that eventually Wechat’s users can do literally everything on it would make the app essentially an operation system doesn’t sound completely crazy. From the business strategy point of view, this move is widely perceived as an attempt of Wechat to bypass and replace existing app stores. In January 2017, Allan Zhang, Head of Wechat Business Unit in Tencent, announced the official launch of Wechat Mini Program, a new function that allows users to access light apps (less than 1 gigabyte) without having to download or install new apps. In addition to chatting, social media, money transfer and mobile payment, the functions fulfilled by Wechat itself, products and services enabled by third parties on this platform such as news feeding, enterprise customer service, car hailing and movie ticket purchasing are common use cases too. It is also difficult to fit Wechat into any individual product category as a user can do so many different things on it. If you view Wechat simply as a messaging app, it would be difficult to understand why as of 2016 Wechat managed to achieve 768 million DAU with half of the users spending over 90 minutes each day on it.
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