“Don’t develop an app, just make an official account.”
This is what I said to all my friends who are starting their own businesses recently. App ecology has become saturated, and it is no longer necessary to develop apps for low-frequency products. It will be the best choice to develop wechat public accounts (application accounts in the future).
Eight years ago, when someone told you to develop mobile apps first and then PC, you thought it was a joke. Two years ago, if someone had told you to develop a wechat official account first, then an app, and then a simple PC product, you might have thought it was a joke. Now, if I told you that in six months, you really can stop developing apps, I wouldn’t be kidding.
This article will tell you two things:
- Why is it reasonable to only develop wechat public accounts
- What might an application number look like
Let me take my time.
Let’s start with a case
Not long ago, my friends and I were having dinner in a fast food restaurant. Suddenly a foreigner came over and said hello to my friend. Then we sat down and got to know each other. Drew, a foreigner, spoke More Chinese than I did In English. He was a product manager, and when he found out that I knew Zhang Xiaolong, he smiled from ear to ear and said,
I am a fan of Zhang Xiaolong, I think wechat is the whole world, this year should only develop wechat public number, do not need to develop iOS and Android.
He is the product leader of “Yoli Spoken English”. Yoli Spoken English is a human English education product, which is completely and solely based on wechat. It is a “wechat app” in a strict sense. It has a fairly large system of products and interactions.
The products of Yoli spoken language are divided into two parts: student end and teacher end.
On the student side, they will use the wechat service number to do so. Students can purchase the courses on Yoli, and after purchase, Yoli will match the students with the teacher using Uber’s ordering mode:
Then students can have a conversation with the teacher in the service number, and learn and practice English interactively according to the planned lessons:
On the teacher side, they use the enterprise number. Teachers can grab orders and give lessons to students on the enterprise number.
At the end of each class, students can evaluate their teachers.
As you can see from the image below, all of the functionality on the teacher side is packaged into the Enterprise.
Simply drawing its product architecture looks like this:
Of course, the actual architecture is much more complex than the one shown above.
This is the “most complete” wechat official account I have ever seen. Moreover, Drew and his team have no plan to develop iOS or Android app. For their product team, they believe that only developing wechat official account is enough.
Yoli oral gave me great inspiration, like quotation, 2 years ago, if someone tells you, only to develop WeChat public, you must feel unbelievable, but now, had appeared in the WeChat function of complex number, public and application number will be posted in the near future, we still have what reason, not or only development WeChat public priority number?
Wechat official accounts must be the future
The wechat public account mentioned in this paper is more of a functional public account. Although the subscription account can also be connected with the development interface, from the perspective of products, most of the future development will be based on the service account and the upcoming “application account”, which may be collectively referred to as “wechat APP”. The simple definition is as follows:
In order to meet certain needs of users, messages or web applications completely based on wechat are developed. The entrance is the public account. Users can complete all operations without leaving wechat, and all needs are met in the public account.
To reiterate, the “wechat APP” mentioned here does not refer to the “we-media” such as the public account “Qiba”, but a complete closed-loop functional product. For example, if you develop an iOS app, and you register a subscription account to post articles every day to promote the product, then this subscription account cannot be defined as “wechat app”.
In many ways, developing wechat accounts is better than developing iOS and Android apps.
Where is the user, where is the product
If you are a shoe merchant and your shoes are for southerners only, you should set up shop in the South or advertise in southerner haunts and websites.
Let customers see you where they are.
For the vast majority of Chinese mobile Internet users, they (and we) spend most of their time on wechat. I, for example, spent 16.6 hours on wechat front desk in the past 7 days (the iPhone comes with stats), which means I spent more than 2 hours a day on wechat.
Therefore, for the vast majority of products, our target users are also wechat users, so why not develop products in wechat to make our products easier to reach users?
Developed from the perspective of frequency of use
Turn on your iPhone and check your battery statistics, and you’ll easily see that wechat accounts for the largest percentage of your battery use.
Looking at my stats over the past seven days, I also found that of the 218 apps I have installed on my iPhone, I have used only 28 in the past week. Of those, eight are system apps, meaning I have opened only 20 third-party apps. Only 10 use more than 1%. We assume that applications that consume more than 1% of power are high-frequency applications, then:
I only use 10 apps frequently in a week, which is only 4% of my installed apps.
I’m sure non-IT people don’t have as many apps as I do, but they only use about 10 apps frequently.
This means that most apps are used by the low frequency, and the fate of being used by the low frequency is likely to be “deleted”, because unlike deleting wechat friends, deleting an APP can really save a lot of memory.
So, how can low-frequency APPS avoid being deleted? Take up as little space as possible.
How can you do that? Make it a wechat official account.
When users follow a public account in wechat, they “download” an app, but there is no waiting time for the download, nor does it occupy the phone’s memory.
From the point of view of promotion
Consider this scenario: your product is about to be promoted, you hand out leaflets on the roadside, are passers-by more likely to download a 100MB app by scanning the code, or follow a public account?
The answer is obvious.
Although this year to promote download an app or the public, the cost is very high, but in the moment I would reach the user brings out the advantages of the public, “without having to download” no matter from which point of view, is to reduce the psychological burden, anyway look not kui, pay attention to the don’t like to take off immediately, and download an app don’t like, You’ll regret the traffic and download time.
Think of it from a marketing perspective
Because of the existence of the circle of friends, users’ use of products and participation in communication occur in the same place, which means that using the same marketing method, users’ participation in communication conversion rate is higher, because the transmission path is shorter.
What’s more, as a wechat app, you can not only provide users with functions, but also push content. If you use the service number, users will get an unread mark on wechat. This is a way to push with a higher arrival rate than app — users are more likely to turn off app push, but generally not wechat push.
Consider development costs
The development of wechat public account involves the front end of the web page and the back end of the server. Compared with the development of iOS and Android, the development cost of at least two platforms is saved, and a lot of time and manpower are saved. Because the development of the two platforms of the client, the server backend development is almost a must, the front end of the web page may be relatively wechat public number less, but in comparison, these front-end work than the client workload is much less.
If you plan to make a product and find an outsourcing company to develop an APP, if they suggest you to develop a wechat public account first, it must be a good outsourcing company.
From the adaptation cost consideration
In the wechat app, users get the same experience no matter what kind of phone they use. If not, they can be reconciled with relatively low development costs.
If you’re an app tester or product manager, you’re going to hate Android because there are so many Android devices out there, with so many different sizes, capabilities, and resolutions that make development and testing a lot of work.
If you are developing a wechat messaging app, wechat provides a fixed message template, which means that users will see the same interface no matter what system they are using.
If you’re building a web app, you just need to tweak the front end code slightly for different screen sizes, and users will have a uniform experience. The cost of adjusting the front end is negligible compared to adjusting for different Android devices.
Think of it from a lean startup perspective
Lean startup is simply trial and error, iteration, trial and error, iteration, success. This is the basic approach to Internet entrepreneurship today.
Developing products based on wechat is more in line with the concept of lean entrepreneurship.
- To save money
- Development costs are lower, speed is faster, and iteration is faster
- Changes don’t need to wait for approval, you can see the results immediately after iteration, and then continue to observe and iterate
Starting a startup with a public account looking for investment is not ridiculous, but rather a leaner start.
Facebook is proving that, too
About two or three years ago (I don’t remember exactly), Facebook stripped out the chat feature as Facebook Messenger, and it looked like wechat when it first launched: chat, groups.
Six months ago, Facebook launched its Messenger Platform, or “Facebook account” in Chinese. In addition to chatting in Messenger, users can follow CNN for news and buy shoes:
As shown in the picture above, CNN’s robot (as opposed to wechat’s official account) can push news to me based on the keywords I send, and I can click a menu from the Shop Spring robot I follow to buy shoes directly.
Not long ago, Dan Grover, a foreigner who used to write for TechCrunch about how wechat is changing the Internet in China, was a product manager at wechat and moved to Facebook to run the Messenger Platform. I don’t know, but one thing is for sure. Facebook has taken note of wechat and is trying to learn from it.
As a result, Facebook is also trying to let third parties provide services to users in the “chat” rather than developing separate apps.
This is the trend.
This time, China is ahead of the US.
However, development based on wechat also has several problems
Compared to iOS and Android apps, only developing wechat public accounts also has some problems.
Pure Web apps are not efficient enough
We can’t just develop a “robot” public account like Siri, because such an experience would be very inefficient in many scenarios. For more scenarios, we click to find the features we want.
Click is basically carried out on the web page, the web page is developed with HTML5, whether smooth browsing, and network speed, page capacity are related, unlike native apps, in addition to the content to load, other controls are localized.
What’s more, without the Internet, the wechat official account would be completely dead because it can’t be used offline.
From this perspective, native apps are better than wechat public accounts.
I’m on my own
The App Store has editorial and recommendation mechanisms, as well as leaderboards, which give each App additional access to promotion in addition to its own channels. Android is the same, each domestic Android market, there are promotion places.
But wechat has never promoted any public number, each public number can only rely on their own, the platform will not give you traffic.
Even after the launch of the app number, wechat platform should not promote any third-party app number in the short term. I am convinced of it.
Unable to obtain user profiles and friend relationships
After logging in via wechat, wechat returns the user’s OpenID, profile picture, nickname, gender, language, city, and nothing else for each product. Unlike Facebook, which uses wechat to log in, wechat does not return the user’s friend relationship.
If you’re building an app and you’re promoting it with another app, you might cross-check your user data to make a better marketing strategy.
But in two different wechat public accounts, you can’t see how many followers cross. Unless these two public accounts are under the same developer account. Because the user’s OpenID is different for each public account.
There are so many limitations that you still need to develop features to collect user data (such as mobile phone numbers, email addresses, etc.) after users have logged in for more targeted marketing and development features.
Limitations of marketing
There are a lot of wechat public accounts. Among the closed public accounts, the most talked about one is “induced sharing”.
Not long ago, a marketing campaign by Yidao Yongche was defined by wechat as “induced sharing” and banned.
To survive on the platform, you have to follow wechat’s rules, and “induced sharing” is one of the most annoying rules for developers — what product doesn’t want users to share more? What product doesn’t induce users to share it with their friends?
However, wechat does not want marketing activities to lower the quality of moments.
It’s a balancing act, but it’s a difficult balancing act that often leads to developer discomfort and complaints. Either, try to live in the rules of wechat, or think about how other channels can play.
Entries are mixed in the session list
Conversations with wechat service numbers are mixed together in a list, just like those with friends. Although there is a special public number entrance in the “address book”, the public number inside cannot be sorted freely.
This means that users can’t put commonly used ICONS on the first screen or categorize them as they would on the desktop.
This will reduce the retention of the public account, because users need to search or layer by layer structure to find the public account that they have paid attention to before.
Could web apps be faster?
From a technical point of view, the reasons that prevent more people from “only” developing wechat public accounts may be:
So, is there a way to solve this problem?
The inspiration of Nike advertisement
On the first day of the Rio Olympics, my moments were flooded with this Nike AD:
It’s not the content of the ads, but the loading speed, which looks like a native wechat feature.
Later, the official wechat post said that this is wechat’s “native advertising”, the loading speed is 10 times faster than before. I don’t know how they measured this multiple.
The AD loaded so quickly because:
- The latest version of wechat app has integrated the control to display this AD, that is, the AD is not completely HTML5 web page, part of the structure is native to the wechat client.
- When a user receives an AD but doesn’t open it (a friend sends it to you, or you’re about to see it in moments), the AD is already loading, not clicking on it.
Although wechat official did not announce the principle of “native advertising”, but basically the above speculation.
In other words, web apps can load as fast as native apps.
Lessons from Progressive Web App
I’m going to start talking about something a little bit more esoteric but interesting about social investing.
Google has been promoting Web apps for a very, very long time. It encourages developers to build web apps and provides technical and API support. However, previous initiatives did not specifically promote Web apps until recently, when Google introduced the concept of Progressive Web App (PWA).
PWA is an application that runs in a browser, a concept that encapsulates a set of technologies that translate easily: progressive Web applications. We don’t need to understand the technology behind it, just what it can do:
- Instant loading. Load times can be more than 10 times faster than before, and reliability can be extremely high even with slow Internet speeds.
- The experience is smooth. Operate the web as if it were a native app.
- Add to the home screen. PWA can generate an icon that can be added to the home screen.
- Push notifications. Even if the browser is closed, users can still receive PWA’s push.
- The response type. Suitable for a variety of screens and devices.
- Security. All data is transferred over HTTPS.
- Progressive loading. Load the frame first, then fill in the content.
- Offline use. Without the Internet, it can still be used.
This is possible because PWA is supported by browsers, including the latest versions of Chrome, Opera, and Firefox, which provide a unified set of apis to enable progressive Web applications (PWA) to run.
To sum it up in one sentence:
PWA is a web application, but the experience is almost the same as a native client.
Unfortunately, Safari doesn’t support PWA yet.
The good times for web apps have arrived
Whether it is Nike’s wechat advertisement, or Google is promoting the progressive web application, are telling us: web applications can load quickly, offline is possible, web applications can be comparable to the native client, which means that the wechat public account experience, will also be more and more similar to the native client.
I have to mention that the aforementioned Nike AD, if you put your phone on airplane mode and open the AD again, the AD will also show up.
Perhaps wechat already supports technology similar to PWA.
What will the application number look like?
It has been almost a year since wechat announced its upcoming app. No matter from any source, no one outside knows what the app will look like and what functions it will provide for developers.
When I brazenly discussed PWA with the wechat team, they replied that we would strike the best balance between components and the Web, ensuring consistency and efficiency of the application, while also maintaining ease of development.
Combined with this sentence, from the needs of developers to the enlightenment of PWA technology, we can roughly guess what kind of functions wechat application number has.
Native controls
From the point of view of faster loading, application numbers provide developers with a unified set of controls.
These controls may be HTML front-end controls embedded in wechat, client-side native controls, or both.
For example, an app might provide a list of information controls. If you’re creating a news app, you just need to connect the news data and the content will be displayed in the native controls.
Another example, you do is a shopping application number, you need to do is to develop a background and API docking, so that goods directly in the native list frame display.
Developers may be able to customize some of the native controls, but they may not be able to make major changes.
A powerful API
Currently, wechat provides developers with audio, sharing and other apis. Considering that application numbers are closer to native apps, wechat may provide developers with more online and local apis.
Such as graphical interface, such as auxiliary computing, and such as background loading.
These interfaces make it possible for application numbers to run offline.
Native control, front-end technology, Bot combination
The first two points mean that wechat apps will be closer to native apps, with faster loading speed, local computing power, offline use, etc. Developers can adjust the official native controls according to their own needs.
For applications with high degree of freedom requirements, a lot of front-end development may still be needed, but combined with the API of the application number, these front-end pages may still load very quickly.
Including the original Bot mode (that is, you send a message to the public account, the public account returns a text message), the application will be a combination of native controls, front-end technology, Bot.
Application Number communication
Application numbers may gradually communicate with each other.
At its simplest, one app can share content with another. Something like this:
Further down, you can jump between application numbers.
Further down, apps may share a special storage space, like iCloud, where they can concentrate on processing files.
More open notification systems
Currently, using wechat’s customer service interface, service accounts can push countless messages to followers who have interacted with them in the past 48 hours, compared to only four times a month for everyone.
Four times a month is not enough.
Instead of limiting all service accounts to four notifications a month — like in native apps, where users can choose to turn off notifications if they get too aggressive — maybe the app will let users choose how often they want to receive notifications.
If so, wechat may add a unified notification management interface to the client.
Opening the Desktop
Remember the Google PWA mentioned earlier? PWA is responsive, which means that once an application is developed, it can run on a phone as well as a computer.
Wechat has Windows and Mac versions (though not updated for a million years), and the Windows version of the app already has a subscription account, which allows users to view articles on their computers.
Based on this speculation, it is reasonable to believe that if wechat uses application numbers in a similar way to PWA, then wechat only needs to add a portal on the desktop client and the application numbers can run on the desktop.
For developers, develop a mobile and “earn” a desktop.
Special application number entry, can be sorted
Wechat may provide entry to app numbers in the client, just like the wallet function now:
Users can sort them according to their own preferences.
Developer tools
Previously, wechat has provided web debugging tools for developers for service numbers, and it may be a matter of time to provide developer tools for application numbers.
Maybe a user friend relationship?
Maybe it will gradually open up the friend relationship as Facebook has opened up the friend relationship to third party applications and so far there has been no problem. If Tencent is open enough, it may open up the friend relationship. At that point, the app numbers will be more interesting.
Again, this is all speculation
To reiterate, I did not get any details about the app number from any wechat employee. The above is all speculation.
This is a new opportunity
IOS and Android app development costs are high and promotion is difficult. From the perspective of lean entrepreneurship, it is a reasonable choice to give priority to the development of wechat public accounts.
The emergence of progressive web application technology makes the experience of web application and native application closer and closer. Web App can also be loaded quickly and offline.
Products should be developed where users are. Users should develop “wechat App” when they are in wechat. Technically, we’ve arrived at the right solution. All we have left to do is wait for the app number to arrive.
Until it arrives, we can still develop based on service numbers. I’m sure wechat will provide a migration solution. If you wait until the app launches, you may miss out on new opportunities.
Perhaps one day, the Internet company’s technical team, there will be a special post called “wechat development engineer”, you believe it or not? I believe.