In China, WeChat wants to kill app stores

WeChat has 846 million active users at the last count, most of whom are in mainland China.

WeChat is so pervasive and dominant in China that people spend 35 percent of their smartphone time in it. That’s more than any other app by a factor of three.

WeChat is more than China’s leading messaging app and social network. Its huge array of features – online shopping, in-store payments, bill payments, news, and celebrity bloggers, to name but five – make it a universe unto itself for its 846 million active users, most of whom are in mainland China.

But WeChat is not done with its push to dominate China’s internet.

Its next step: destroy the app stores.

WeChat’s newest feature – dubbed “Mini Programs” – allows users to access and utilise an array of apps within the messaging app itself. WeChat parent company Tencent, China’s social media and gaming giant with a valuation of US$239 billion, will be the gatekeeper of these apps. With this move, WeChat will sidestep Apple and the various Android app stores from which Chinese people get their app fix. (Google Play is blocked in China, so it’s not a factor).

See: The amazing ways WeChat is used in China

The Great Wall of WeChat

The giant social network, which first launched in 2011, is now prepping this daring new feature with a select group of beta testers. The details are not yet finalized or fully in the public sphere, but some of the testers have leaked enough information that we now have a rough picture of how it’ll work.

WeChat is saying that other apps are not very relevant.

To get into WeChat’s app store, companies will have to develop apps that are different from their Android and iOS versions. These are “built with a special framework designed by Tencent” and based on JavaScript, say the team at WalkTheChat, a marketing company devoted to WeChat.

On the user side, the apps are accessed from within a new panel inside WeChat, near where hundreds of millions of people regularly go to post photos or links to Moments, which is WeChat’s answer to Facebook’s Wall. On Android phones, the WeChat apps might spawn homescreen icons that look exactly like an app, as shown by Zhang Xiaolong, Tencent senior vice president and “father of WeChat.”

WeChat apps, some bearing names like “mini” and “lite”, have their own homescreen shortcuts in this photo of an Android phone from Tencent exec and WeChat founder “Allen” Zhang Xiaolong. Photo credit: Allen Zhang’s WeChat account; via Technode.

It looks quite a lot like Google’s “app streaming,” unveiled last year, which later morphed into Instant Apps. But Google still hasn’t launched it.

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