No this is not "be like China", don't flatter yourself. When Facebook and Twitter was banned, there were imminent security threats as these platforms were used for organized crimes in China, and these companies simply ignores the requests from Chinese government to remove certain accounts. Google decided to not comply with local rules and left China by itself.
How so? Google operated in China for more than a decade and never got a major market share, and they already did fairly well compared to others. Facebook was largely unheard of after being available in China for many years before finally got banned in 2010. Amazon has been operating in China forever but is basically irrelevant to most Chinese. Most American companies did terrible job in localization and I see no chance of them winning the competition with their local competitors.
If they face strong local competition in any other country, they'd fail too
As a Chinese expat, Google China (back when it was operating) was multiple times slower than Baidu and would get blocked by the GFW arbitrarily frequently.
I was able to use Google fine for many years before it was banned. It can get banned when you search for certain keywords, not arbitrary at all.
Google was about the only one I can think of that is not worse than their competitors, and their own product actually don't need much localization.
However, Google failed the growth part in China. Chinese users won't go ahead and set the default search engine to google.com on their own unless they already know about it, especially those don't know English. The homepage used by most Chinese are local websites like hao123 that would send traffic to Baidu
google.cn is located at its Beijing datacenter. If it's multiple times slower then Google's network optimization was really shit. GFW only works for cross-border connections.
Good examples. AirBnB operated fine in China even has a China BU last time I checked. Uber sold it's operation in China to local competitors as they were losing any way.
No AirBNB was/is getting CRUSHEd in china because the monopoly power of the companies already present. You have to understand that competition in China is like a childrens playground, with the CCP being the parents.
They will choose the winners and losers, but they will do so by balancing their own metrics, which has China's economic power as no.1 priority.
Only know is Airbnb doing more OK, after moving servers to china, making local joint ventures, changing their name to a chinese one etc. etc.
AirBnB would still get crushed like most other American companies when they face strong local competitors even if they have full support from CCP. These companies are usually terrible at localization and what works in America won't just work in China. Doesn't mean it's not possible for them to succeed, LinkedIn for example, did fairly well in China so far.
AirBnB moved server to China because their website would be terribly slow if not, they need local joint ventures or otherwise they would have little idea in how to navigate in Chinese market. Of course they need a Chinese name, how else would you expect users to know what "Airbnb" is? Nobody would remember. They can change their name to a series of numbers and that would still work better than "Airbnb"
WeChat has lots of things hidden behind low impression entrypoints. You can explore them when you want. Its primary features, chat and moments, are dead simple, like WhatsApp. Facebook on the other hand, are mixing lots of stuff into their main feed, making the experience horrible for everyone
Marketing/business side always demand prime real-estate to push 'features' instead of just blending them into the UI. This is extra-apparent on mobile apps but FB did it on their website for years (I haven't seen what it looks like recently).
It's not easy to say no as a designer but the best companies are the ones most capable of keeping things as focused on primary UX flows as possible.
TikTok figured this out by making it all about scrolling a simple page of high-density videos, the entire screen is full of the content you want. No extra tapping or side scrolling needed.
Reddit is another company that missed the boat on what made their website great during their redesign. Making it feel top-heavy JS-wise and sparser instead of simple high-density information like newspaper site with simple links. For ex: the first article on old.reddit.com is 100px from the top and can fit 10 articles within 1000px, while the new one starts at 400px and lists 3-4 posts by 1000px (HN is 55px and 20+ posts).
Instagram is dead simple as well, if you stick to the main feed and just posting photos. I've used instagram without touching any of the stuff discussed in the top-level comment.
Douyin is a mix of lots of things but you barely realize that. It has one main surface - the feed. IG on the other hand, feels like several unrelated things stitched together
The way WeChat distributes additional content is in the form of mini-apps, which has no similarly to GMS. It is something that does not exist in the ecosystem of US apps.
In China and other emerging markets, downloading apps from app store are just something that many users would rarely do, no matter it is App Store, Play Store, or many other Android App Stores available in China. It is a big obstacle that most US developers never realised.
The main benefit of super apps, and why it is so popular in those countries, is that it doesn't require users to download anything to use new feature. In some use cases I also found that so convenient.
Just as an example, WeChat has an ecosystem of mini-apps. When you go to a restaurant in China, you can often find QR code on each table. If you can that QR code, it would open a mini-apps that lets you place orders and make payments, without waiting for the waiter to serve you. A mini app is like a website that doesn't require download and storage on the phone, but the user experience feels more native and is tightly integrated with features available in WeChat. It would be much harder to get users if the same thing requires you download an app.
> In China and other emerging markets, downloading apps from app store are just something that many users would rarely do, no matter it is App Store, Play Store, or many other Android App Stores available in China. It is a big obstacle that most US developers never realised.
As someone who's never been to China and has never used a super-app: just curious, what are some of the obstacles faced installing a mobile app? Is it that most people don't trust un-curated apps?
On Android, there isn't one single authoritative app store (since the Play Store isn't available). Therefore every carrier, OEM, major app maker make their own app store (which behaves belligerently to their competitors). The users and app makers get caught in the middle of this messy fight. As a user, you might pick the 'wrong' app store. And developers will never have time to upload every update to 100 app stores, each of which may require slightly different metadata. So the stores clone each other's APK which lead to very slow and irreversible rollouts for devs. In a hyper competitive environment like China, not being able to control exactly when your binaries deploy is a huge, vital vulnerability so it has to be solved.
A super app that brings existing user bases solves both the deployment and discoverability problems.
In China (especially in tier 3,4 cities and rural places) and similar markets alike where many user have low digital literacy, installing apps from App Store is a skill that lots of users don't have. Their first few apps on their phone were most likely installed with someone else's help.
Actually learning every new app is an obstacle, but they managed to learn to a few apps like WeChat because it's super useful. They won't spend time to learn about something that won't bring immediate reward. Once they have a few apps installed on their phone, they'd feel that's enough.
Possible, but I see two big obstacles:
1. Mini-apps are optimized for this one purpose and feels much faster and native, websites won't be able to achieve the same.
2. Some features provided by WeChat is actually important, especially the payment part. Websites won't be able to integrate something like WeChat pay seamlessly as mini-apps do. If it requires users to put in credit card information, it would instantly fail in these countries
I can't comment on 1 but for 2, I'm seeing a lot more merchants (probably Shopify merchants) support mobile payments on their websites (yes websites, not mobile apps) these days.
I can now go to a vendor's website (say jrwatkins.com, etc.) on my phone, checkout, do a fingerprint/face scan on Apple Pay and the transaction is done in under 5 seconds.
I assume the experience with Google Pay is similar.
There's no longer a need to create an account on the website. The delivery address defaults to the one on Apple Pay (and can be modified at time of payment). Delivery method can also be selected on the Apple Pay screen. My credit card number is never transmitted. This type of frictionless checkout that was once the domain of companies like Hoteltonight is now becoming more common on ecommerce sites.
Yeah, if Apple Pay and Google Pay has the same market share then website could integrate those service and achieve the same, I agree. However, Apple Pay and Google Pay are also harder to use from the perspective of both consumers and merchants in these countries in the beginning, and IMO that's the reason they failed in the first place.
I don't know what payment methods these services require now, but in the beginning at least, they both supports just credit cards, which is basically suicidal. Most users won't be able to use it at all.
From merchants' perspective, they don't need to pay for transactions on WeChat Pay or AliPay, whereas both Apple Pay and credit card companies would charge them for usage. For this reason most small business wouldn't even think of using them.
> Yeah, if Apple Pay and Google Pay has the same market share then website could integrate those service
According to the Apple developer docs[1], websites don't have to integrate with Apple Pay specifically; Safari also supports the (fairly new) platform-neutral Payment Request API[2]. Google's docs[3] suggest that something similar is available for Chrome on Android.
Well, from what I'm seeing Apple Pay is gaining traction here in the U.S. Since the NFC part isn't proprietary, it works with almost any terminal (Ingenico, Verifone) that supports contactless payments (with few exceptions).
It supports Apple Cash, which in turn can funded via a bank debit card. (kind of like Venmo). There's no transaction fee with Apple Cash.
I believe there are currently no additional fees on the merchant side to accept Apple Pay [1], unless the customer uses a credit card via Apple Pay in which case the standard credit card fees apply.
The point is the QR based wechat payment is available for all kind of phones and it's available early than apple pay or google pay.
Some merchant like a fruit stand can accept a QR payment, and I don't think they can afford a post machine.
yup, and we need to think about the timeline. At very early stage of this story, only limited phones support NFC, So wechat/alipay can quickly occupy the market with the QR base solution.
I was also thinking about Apple Pay in my original comment. But that's iOS-only, and I'm going to hazard a guess that Google Pay doesn't work in China, so we're back to GP's point.
Right since the existing players are entrenched, but might work for other (emerging) countries?
We've never been big on mobile payments in the U.S. (because credit cards), but I'm finding myself using Apple Pay more and more. I read somewhere than ~50% of payments in the U.S. are now contactless.
I think it largely depends on how much Apple Pay / Google Pay could abandon their western centric design and invest heavily on localization. Payment solutions are just hard to unify - Lots of people in Indonesia don't have bank accounts, Bank transfer is actually a popular way of transaction in Brazil...
On Android, there's Instant Apps[1] though for some reason Google hasn't integrated them on all devices. They work through links/QR codes and through NFC tags. I believe they might also be accessible though the Google Bluetooth Le beacon API (so when you enable the specific feature, you'll get a popup like "this location serves the following app" which you can then instantly launch).
I don't know about iOS but the two copy features from each other all the time so Apple probably has it too (if they weren't the first to launch them).
Honestly, if you're working from a QR code you might as well just serve a mobile web app. If you add PWA support your customers might even install it if they come around often.
US didn't even bother to find a plausible excuse