And a slew of tech companies are adding a mobile wallet feature. Douyin nemesis Kuaishou is already turning into a communication channel and building a "local life" business center. Meituan is said to be testing a group chat feature. This means China may end up with more than one mega app, each favored by different demographics.ĭouyin is hardly the only app that's expanding beyond its core business. Tech analysts can't agree on who will take over the throne from WeChat, but they anticipate that WeChat's status as the super app won't survive Beijing's ongoing antitrust drive. The question now is whether anyone can dethrone it.īy nature, Chinese tech companies do not feel encumbered by their "core competencies." And Chinese web users are accustomed to mega apps that do a lot of different things. In the past decade, WeChat has transformed human interaction in China and grown into an ecosystem for innovation, making it virtually the sole super-app most of China can't live without. Instead, it's one of several Chinese apps engaged in a quiet, high-stakes battle to become the next WeChat, a mega app that now has 1.1 billion monthly active users, 80% of China's total population. It's clear that the young Douyin is not content to be just an entertainment app, however lucrative that may be.
DOUYIN CHINESE DOUYIN PAY WECHAT PAY OFFLINE
Now Douyin has expanded into the so-called "local life services," taking on Meituan, a dominant player in this space, which offers a wide range of services meeting users' offline life needs, from food delivery to ticket booking. It's part of a pattern: Over the past few years, Douyin has beefed up its social network by adding features from livestreaming to ecommerce, from gaming to instant messaging, challenging existing dominant players in each vertical. In March, Douyin users in three Chinese cities discovered that the popular short-video app had quietly launched a new Groupon-like feature, a "group buying" feed that allowed users to order takeout, book hotels and reserve tickets and services.
0 kommentar(er)
