Chinese Mobile UI Trends
dangrover.com
dangrover.com
I highly recommend that any entrepreneur spend at least a couple months in a Chinese country. There are billions of consumers, all eager to spend money, and only 42% of them are on the Internet so far. Clearly Asia is an attractive market, but if you've never experienced Chinese culture then you will have no idea what the context of it looks like. You need to go see for yourself.
Much of this post resonated with me. Still, if you've only read the post, and not seen the culture, you are missing a lot. After a few weeks in Taiwan, a few things were very clear. Most notably, LINE is incredibly popular. It's the dominant messaging app, ahead of even iMessage, MMS. People love the stickers, btw, and they pay for them!
Also, Taipei has a 7/11 on every corner, no joke. You can do all sorts of useful things at 7/11. You can pay your bills, pickup packages, order meals, and more. You can also use a refillable "EZCard" which is an RFID chip that works at many retail outlets as well as subway stations. In general, the 7/11's in Taiwan make an effort to integrate as many products as they can into their economy. You'll see a lot of offline (hah) LINE promotions, e.g. partnered with drink companies and 7/11.
It seems like in general, once users in Asia are entrenched in a service/network, they are fiercely loyal to it. That's why you don't see users switching from LINE to other apps, and why certain Asian countries might prefer one paritcular messaging app over another.
What I miss most, though, is the unlimited 20mbps tethering with my $40/mo pay-as-you-go plan...
Oh, and here's a prime example of how crazy loyal Chinese consumers are for their products. Watch this video of a Xiaomi product launch, f*ing crazy. [0]
From what I heard, people in mainland use Wechat, which is probably why you haven't heard of LINE. Still, it has 700 million users, started in Japan, and is far and away the most popular in Taiwan (from what I could tell). It looks like wiki says 17 million Taiwanese users, but that's probably higher now, and anecdotally, it seemed that almost every college-aged student I met used LINE daily.
As I mentioned, they do a lot of visible sponsorship/partnerships. You'll see a lot of "LINE contests" attached to juice bottles, running at the bottom of newscasts, etc.
My prediction was that we will see the GFW come down in a few years, once the "human rights" debate reaches critical mass, but moreso once the userbases of domestic companies reach critical mass. Once the big Chinese tech companies have enough of a head-start on all their US counterparts, and they're ready to expand Westward, the GFW will come down.
China realizes that it has a population of 2 billion, and therefore wields far more raw economic power potential than any other country. Therefore China wants to develop its own domestic tech economy to serve its users in a way that conforms to its culture and benefits the Chinese economy overall. Furthermore, there's no reason that its domestic companies would not eventually branch westward in the same way that US companies are attempting to branch eastward.
We're starting to see the same thing in Russia. Geographic Internet isolation is becoming a common trend and a useful geopolitical powerplay. I suspect we'll see more of it from large countries interested in nurturing their own domestic tech economy.
They are not blocked and they have localized Chinese versions.
Another example, one of the greatest enemy in the history of QQ is, guess what, the re-branded & died MSN Messenger (plus the dead Live Space blogging platform)
Even when western companies come into China, they are often hampered by different rules and forced into JVs with entitled princelings. It is not an apples to apples comparison.
The drop in emoticon quality was the second worst thing with going back to Skype (which I have to use because everyone else here in the US does).
(not sure whether this is something that everyone knows already : Perhaps I only just got the news... (Presuming this is actually true, of course))
The former knocks apple/google out of the gatekeeper role, and the latter presumably lets somebody else take a percentage fee off the top.
In the US, I understand ios and android try their hardest to not allow apps that do these tricks into their app store. Not at all familiar with China... are there different rules for being listed there, different players, or just an unregulated wild-west where everyone has jailbroken functionality?
It's more troubling for older people who haven't studied or have forgotten about Pinyin and need to resort to shape-based methods.
Hong Kongers obviously don't use Pinyin, and I think most are quite a bit slower than Mainlanders in typing characters. Some write in components, others draw the full characters, which is slowed down by the fact that HK uses traditional characters.
(As for Taiwan, I think shape-based input methods are also most common, and I would be surprised if Taiwanese were faster than Mainlanders in typing characters. But I'm not that familiar with input methods in Taiwan.)
Should we expect the Chinese search giants (which the author mentions are often easier to use than the host OS) to start releasing their own OSes? It seems that Android and iOS are rather poorly designed to Chinese use cases - though no doubt at least Apple is working to fix that (Google has less reason to because, as the author mentions, it is banned in China).
Xiaomi is a device manufacturer; I'm specifically referring to Baidu, 360, Sogou, etc. If their search/translation functions really are that much better, they could drive the interface of the phone and create a better experience. The Chinese market is certainly different than the west, but that's what we've seen happen here.
Could you go into more detail on these apps?
- 42% of people in China have access to Internet
- 80% of people with access to Internet have it through mobile
Those facts alone should be enough to kick your ass into gear working on products for chinese mobile market.
I've got a few more juicy facts up my sleeve but I'll keep them to myself. :) China market is RIPE for making money right now. Green fields abound.
Group: In a normal chat, you can unilaterally add people to create a group, and it is permanent, and can be named. The creator has kick privileges, but anyone can add more people. So when people have dinner, they'll just add everyone they want to invite and then send the invite, maps, etc. to the group. Then during/after the event, everybody will send photos. Invitees can also add their own people to the group. I have current groups for weekly dinners, old parties, meetups, and work. It's way easier to set up and does much more than google+ / email / whatever it's replacing.
Some groups (for birthdays, etc.) stay around forever, as that person's social hub. Our work group sees a lot of use.
Once a group gets big you can't force-add people (they have to accept invites when the group is 40+). There are also some very touchy issues with leaving - when you leave the whole group gets a message, so people feel stuck in groups, or have to think carefully about how to get out gracefully.
I think this is what google hangouts / wave were meant to be. Not much management required, and unrelated people can be brought in, so it's under many people's control.
It probably won't happen in China, but I'd love to see anonymous messaging groups - you can see who's in the group but not who sent every message. Sort of like 4chan, and another way to allow more people to contribute; it'd also pull out things you won't be able to find out otherwise.
"Many sites also allow users to log in by scanning a QR code in the site’s own app. In the QR code is an expiring session identifier that, once read by the mobile app, associates that browser session with the logged-in account."
Username and password logins suck for a number of reasons (although keyloggers are mentioned as the primary reason in the post), and as smartphones become ubiquitous this could allow a much easier and more secure workaround.
The author deserves a huge amount of credit, it's very, very rare for even long time expatriates to be able to explain things so well.