Riders use their mobile phones on Hong Kong’s mass transit rail system. Mike Clarke/AFP/Getty Images
This summer, I packed up all my things and moved from San Francisco to Guangzhou, China for work. Through an unlikely chain of coincidences that I don’t entirely recall, I’ve become a product manager on WeChat, a popular messaging app in China.
Moving to a new country has meant learning how to do lots of things differently: speaking a new language, eating, shopping, getting around. In a few months, I’m surprised at how acclimated I’ve become to what, at first, seemed such an overwhelmingly alien place.
This has applied to my digital life too. I’ve replaced all my apps with those used here, owning both to my keen interest as someone in the tech industry, and to “go native” to the extent I can. Since then, I’ve similarly become blind to the adaptations required there, too.
One day, for the fun of it, I started writing a list in my notebook of all the things that are different between apps here and those I’m accustomed to using and creating back in the US. When I finished, I was surprised by how long the list was, so it seemed fitting to flesh it out into a post.
Walled Gardens, Portals, Platforms
Richard Gabriel’s The Rise Of “Worse is Better”, now a classic essay, was the first to draw a distinction between two opposing views on software design:
There’s the “Worse is Better” approach exemplified by UNIX and C as developed at Bell Labs. It leans towards collections of small, somewhat crude, interoperable tools. Then there’s the “The Right Thing”/”Better is Better” approach, exemplified by Common Lisp, Scheme, and Emacs as developed at MIT. This approach produces larger, more comprehensive, monolithic solutions to problems.
The latest trend in US apps is splitting apps into “constellations” of ever-more-focused and minimalist task-driven apps, in a nod towards the “worse is better” school. But apps here have been tugged in the opposite direction.
Every app has accumulated more and more features seemingly unrelated to their ostensible purpose — sometimes cleverly integrated, sometimes strapped on arbitrarily — in what I can only imagine are bids to make each app retain eyeballs and work its way into more users’ daily habits.
In China, unlike the U.S., apps are stuffing themselves with all sorts of extraneous features. These often end up in a “discover” tab. Dan Grover
A few examples that come to mind:
- WeChat is the emacs to WhatsApp’s vim. Besides messaging, it does and video calls, has a news feed, a wallet with a payments service, a Favorites feature functioning more like Evernote, a game center (with a built-in game), a location-based people finder, a Shazaam-like song-matching service, and, in accordance with Zawinski’s Law, a mail client. Its official accounts platform (described later) goes as far as providing a layer to allow hardware devices to use the app to communicate with services, instead of requiring custom apps.
- Baidu Maps has weather, an optional “Find My Friends” feature, travel guides, a full “wallet” mode for buying all kinds of things. Tencent Maps lets you send audio postcards. Both have QR code readers and obligatory Groupon-style local offers.
- Weibo, once a Twitter analog, does much more. Its “post” button actually allows one to post up to 10 distinct types of content, from blog entry to restaurant review. It, too, has grown a wallet feature.
- While all-encompassing, Yahoo-like “portal” homepages died in the US sometime in the early 2000’s, they’ve had a long life here in sites like Sina, 163.com, hao123, and Tencent News. Though “normal” apps have all sprouted portal-like features, the actual portal sites all have apps of their own which seem popular enough.
Chat as Universal UI
WeChat has popularized the concept of “official accounts” for brands and public figures. They’re kind of like the IRC and AIM bots of yore — think SmarterChild but for banks, phone companies, blogs, hospitals, malls, and government agencies. Many institutions that otherwise would have native apps or mobile sites have opted instead for official accounts.
You can send any kind of message (text, image, voice, etc), and they’ll reply, either in an automated fashion or by routing it to a human somewhere. The interface is exactly the same as for chatting with your friends, save for one difference: it has menus at the bottom with shortcuts to the main features of the account (though it can be toggled away to reveal the normal text field).
Chat is used as an interface to interact with banks, companies and brands. Dan Grover
Other than that, every feature you can use in a normal chat is available here. WeChat even auto-transcribes the voice messages (mentioned before) into text before passing them to the third-party server running the account.
Official accounts can also push news updates to their subscribers. Every media outlet operates one, making the screen where these accounts live much akin to an RSS reader for many users.
The success of this model has led to many apps appropriating chat-style UI in different ways. Sina Weibo naturally uses it in their own official accounts feature, and as does QQ. But it can also be found in the “customer support center” area of many other apps). A startup called Grata even sells a white-label version of this that can be dropped into any app.
App makers haven’t just seized upon some insight that a familiar chat-style UI would make sense. They’ve actually copied the entire UI, lock, stock, and barrel, down to the layout of the three-tabbed bottom menu and of the “rich media” news messages pushed to subscribers.
Location, Location, Location
Apps here are never shy about asking for permission to retrieve your location, and they usually find some way to use it when you look hard enough — whether it’s auto-filling a “choose your city” dropdown, showing the weather, or to populate a “local offers” screen.
Many apps also let you connect with strangers nearby, which, here, is not creepy at all. The idea’s been tried in the US with apps like Highlight and Skout, but they have never had the degree of mainstream success that the category has enjoyed here. This could be due to differing cultural attitudes, or a simple function of population density and urbanisation. But it’s a widely-used and widely-implemented idea here.
As a Standalone Category
Momo, one app expressly built for this purpose, has over 60 million monthly active users and has already filed for IPO. It lets you meet people near you, but also find events, discussions, games, and more. Weiju and Bilin are other contenders in this category.
Built Into Everyday Apps
Aside from the popularity of these standalone apps, more remarkable still is that every normal, seemingly more utilitarian app also includes such features.
Baidu’s live “heat map” shows density of users. Dan Grover
WeChat and QQ, the two most popular messaging apps, have a “People Nearby” feature giving you a simple list of people near you, often also letting you browse the photos they have posted to their news feeds. It’s opt-in, of course — you appear on the list of people nearby and are contactable for a couple hours by virtue of looking at the list yourself.
Weibo, unlike Twitter, lets you see posts near you, as well as popular accounts and groups. And the major music, movie, and TV apps even show you what media people near you are watching and listening to.
Also noteworthy is Baidu Maps’ “heatmap”, a live-updated, block-by-block population density map, created by aggregating all the user locations transmitted to the server.
I have the feeling that if mainstream US apps ever added these features — even with a careful and restrained implementation — it’d be instant fodder for scare stories on evening news broadcasts and angry diatribes in the blogosphere by some interest group or another.
This post was originally published in longer from on Dan Grover’s blog.
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