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The decline of Internet applications: the era of Super APP is over?

2025-01-30 Update From: SLTechnology News&Howtos shulou NAV: SLTechnology News&Howtos > IT Information >

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"108 versions have been updated in 11 years, and the installation package has soared from 457KB to 257MB, with a difference of 575 times." Some time ago, when a blogger unpacked the installation package, he found that the number has now exceeded 12600 compared with the number of files in the version 1. 0 Wechat installation package. The increasingly bloated Wechat has also been complained by the outside world: in fact, about 90% of the updates are not needed.

From small and beautiful IM products to national apps with more than 1.1 billion daily active users, Wechat now includes more ecology and therefore more functions, including, but not limited to, recharge, shopping, financial management, taxi hailing, ticket buying, video browsing, and Mini Program. On the contrary, it is the core chat function, which takes up the least space unless you store a lot of pictures and text.

Time goes back to last year, Wechat 10th anniversary open class, in the face of the same doubts, Zhang Xiaolong still said: "Wechat is still a small and beautiful product, it is almost as simple as ten years ago." As a colored egg, the official revealed at the meeting that the team is developing an input method, and this product was also released not long ago, but the installed Wechat keyboard can occupy 650mb storage, which is 2-5 times larger than other similar products, so some netizens teased that there may be a "Warcraft 3" compressed inside.

Wechat is not an example. Take the iOS client installation package as an example. QQ is more than 680m, Douyin is close to 400m, Taobao JD.com is also close to 300m, and several G. Internet product managers seem to have figured out the siphon effect, and they are so familiar with the superposition of functions that Musk threatened to learn from Wechat to be an all-embracing super App when he gave a class to everyone on Twitter last year.

But do users really need to optimize and increase these functions? Not exactly.

For example, it is as big as Taobao to embed various kinds of Mini Game, QQ with an illusory 4 engine, Baidu App to test the waters of e-commerce for several years, Alipay to include all the life services, and Meituan's home page to recommend reading novels; as small as an App that listens to music, can live streaming, watch short videos, shop, set up dynamic wallpaper and order takeout, and even after playing with sheep, you have to watch all kinds of ads in order to get props.

Although they may be aimed at drainage, retention rates and advertising costs, it does not prevent us from realizing that the sharp increase in these piecemeal features has not led to more users and high activity, and some App have even embarked on a path of no return.

According to Jobs' understanding, good products should walk at the intersection of technology and humanities, but at home, instead of finding boundaries in this set of rules, product managers become: the smaller the product, the greater the difference. The bigger the thing, the more common it is. Compared with reopening a vertical product, based on the original application soil, inject more plates and possibilities, bigger, do all become a super software, inexplicably become the business consensus of all players.

In an era where features are no longer scarce, distinct independent products have become rare, and Silicon Valley's SaaS is the best example. In China, everyone's solution is to do ecology, big fish eat small fish, small fish eat shrimp, for example, large companies fine and original small enterprises, through the development of standards and open interfaces linked together, Mini Program is the same truth. But it also raises new questions: who will take the lead and why should you take the lead?

01. How many functions do a product need to add to become a junk time retrogression to 2007, Jobs launched the first generation of iPhone, at that time, he did not want to install applications on his smartphone, but regarded the phone as a terminal of cloud services and accessed the website through browser search, because the phone at that time performed poorly in computing, battery life, storage and other capabilities. But it backfired, and the next year he found that the speed of accessing the web was too slow, and in the same year he released Appstore, when Apple began to build an app ecology.

Three years later, Wired pointed out in an article "Web is dead, Internet immortal" that "one of the biggest changes in the digital field in the past few years has been the transition from an open Internet to a semi-closed network platform." These platforms bring a variety of App to smartphones, and as more and more people use App, the latter provides services that allow users to focus not on the search itself, but on access.

At that time, the article believed that App was replacing Web, and Apple's "iTunes+App" model ushered in a new era for the Internet. In fact, as the node of the outbreak of the mobile Internet, in 2010, in addition to the birth of iPhone 4, the App market also ushered in a double outbreak in terms of quantity and volume.

This year, the emergence of the mobile social software Kik subverted SMS, and the number of users exceeded 1 million within 15 days of launch, and the news spread to China on the other side of the ocean, which immediately aroused the butterfly effect. Therefore, when Wechat appeared, in addition to Mi Xiao, Fetion, E-letter, Wang Xin, and other IM players such as Fast chat and Youxin participated in this "thousand letter war".

In the first two months of the advent of Wechat, Zhang Xiaolong posted a lot of product thinking on Fanfu, including the famous phrase "how many functions must be added to a product before it can become garbage." Even if it does not have the first-mover advantage, Tencent's entry is still not to be underestimated. "if Tencent enters this field, the probability of success will be reduced," Lei Jun said when Mimiao was online. " As a result, the word became a curse.

Wechat version 1.0, the function is very single, at that time did not cause much splash, until shake, message in a bottle and other functions online, coupled with the transfer of traffic from PC to mobile, as well as QQ strategy and other reasons, concise and clear features to meet people's needs, users began to shift. As of November 2013, Wechat had more than 600 million registered users, making it the largest IM software in Asia.

At that time, smartphones were just becoming popular, and Internet giants represented by Tencent and Ali aimed at mobile clients and began to enclose land and seize entrances. Ali Li pushed Mobile Taobao, Tencent to expand WeChat Pay's ecological circle, and strengthened the investment and strategic layout of mobile applications, and the big companies were busy adjusting their architecture.

"I'm nervous to see Wechat." At a summit of IT leaders, Jack Ma told Ma Huateng that before that, Alibaba had a business chain, Tencent occupied users' social networking, and Baidu blocked traffic. As the boundaries of the three BAT companies were broken, the high frequency of smartphones made them covetously eyeing each other's territory.

According to relevant media reports, nearly 30 products were developed for Alibaba's internal mobile Internet in 2013. in addition to Wangxin, Communication, Mobile Amoy and Alipay, local life mobile applications such as O2O are also under key development plans. In addition to buying a stake in Sina Weibo, Alibaba has also invested in Momo, Kuaidi and other companies, and spent 80 million US dollars to acquire mobile application service platform Youmeng, to make up for social and mobile shortcomings.

But even so, as Zeng Ming, the person in charge at the time, said: Ali has not yet found a unified mobile user platform. It means that in a period of time, Alibaba's mobile products are still differentiated functions, and the functional differences between different products make them a single point of attack.

At this stage, players realize that the cost of jumping between App is much higher than the hyperlinks of the Web era. Although the mobile Internet allows products to aggregate more in-depth information, the walls between them are also being rebuilt: Ali apps have fully blocked Wechat, Wechat has also blocked the promotion links on Taobao, and looking abroad, Apple and Facebook are like fish in water in business with a more closed ecosystem, which establishes a profit model of trading users' attention for advertising. Google, which relies on open principles, is declining.

All in one and Best of breed are at both ends of the scale, and both the market and players prefer the latter.

At that time, although the installation package volume of most mainstream App in China rose from kb to mb, it was also controlled within 5MB, and the mobile phone memory space was basically maintained at about 16-32G, which most people could not use up at all. This also means that most of the App at that time had distinct personalities, unified internal functions of the products, almost no unnecessary functions in the platform, no need for mutual awakening and active background, and no unreasonable file storage mechanism.

02. The inflection point for becoming the maker of the rules of the game appeared in 2017. As the three major operators have reduced their traffic charges, the number of mobile Internet users has approached 1 billion, hardware has been upgraded, storage space has been released, and social, entertainment, office and other functions have been integrated. Smartphones have changed their roles from tools to electronic organs.

According to QuestMobile data, with the mobile Internet traffic dividend peaking as the background, as of the first half of 2018, the number of App on the Chinese market has exceeded 4.06 million. From the user's point of view, 35 App have been able to meet most of the demand, from seizing the market to competing for traffic, seizing the maximum extent of user time has become a tacit plan for players, and the volume of App has also expanded rapidly.

2017-2018 China Mobile netizens installed App distribution proportion, Tu Yuan QuestMobile typical example is still Wechat, Fetion, NetEase bubble and other players exit, as well as communications, payment, moments, official account multi-duty Wechat, indeed still retain the gene to leave after use, but with the release of "jump" Mini Game, Wechat third-party Mini Program officially opened, various functions have been embedded The concept of the transformation from platform to ecology is also emerging.

From the perspective of the underlying logic of the change of the product itself, the product is a collection of functions, and the extension and transformation of functions are inseparable from the path of high frequency band and low frequency, rigid demand with non-rigid demand. For example, no matter how much it changes, Wechat's chat function is always in the dimension of the product's high-frequency rigid demand, and instant messaging accounts for the first two of the four tab.

High-frequency functions need to be accessible to users, shorten the use path of users, and build functional ecology based on core functions. You will find that functions like WeChat moments and Mini Program have deeper entrances, but because Wechat itself is a huge traffic portal, you don't have to worry about not having users.

Some developers once sighed in the blog: "now is the world of BAT, App independent survival space is constantly squeezed, independent App want to occupy the market position, time is running out." After many rounds of verification, the most important entrances are still stable, such as e-commerce, entertainment, local life and other App headers, which also means that the App pattern is gradually stable, so BAT manufacturers began to take advantage of their mainstream App to open Mini Program and various entrances to retain customers.

Although they all say that they advocate openness, when it comes to the use of products, ecology not only means convenience, but also a new round of self-admiration and commercial closed-loop. The final winners all want to achieve unity, because they know that once they become omnipresent, they become the makers of the rules of the game.

Therefore, when the core App, such as Wechat, Alipay and Meituan, gain absolute control over the traffic, on the one hand, they need to gain weight functionally; on the other hand, Super App can connect other applications of the same line and empower them. For example, while Wechat connects everything, its infinitely expanding boundaries also create more realization possibilities for itself.

03. The products with unclear strategy are the pioneer products of smartphones. The three versions of iPhone 4 memory are 512MB+8GB, 512MB+16GB and 512MB+32GB. The mobile phone era of 16GB memory is gone forever, and it has been replaced by the huge memory volume of 8GB+256GB and even 12GB+512GB.

According to QuestMobile data, if MAU is more than 100 million as the "installation must-have" application standard, then there are now 25 App exceeding the standard line, covering communications, e-commerce, maps, short videos, information, browsers, local life, games and other aspects of life. On this basis, as mentioned earlier, App is in the stage of expanding device memory, which is most obviously reflected by the superposition and bloating of functions.

As early as a few years ago, someone launched a campaign for the Green Application Convention to solve the problem of bloated App, and then the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology led the establishment of a unified push alliance, aimed at reducing the extraneous code and functions that App specifically added to push messages, but these played little role, and the actual response was very little.

At the Baidu World Congress in 2013, Baidu launched the light application model for the first time, which uses the search box to search App directly to achieve instant use. Although this model has not been continuously valued, it can be regarded as the predecessor of Mini Program, but Mini Program is endorsed by the platform, especially for players, they think that entrusting operations, payment and other processes to Mini Program is tantamount to giving half your life to Tencent.

So, how can we realize the double insurance of lightweight and safety?

In fact, we have all experienced this change first-hand. Since 2018, there has been a wave of extreme version of the mobile Internet racetrack. Since Kuaishou launched the extreme version of App, Jinri Toutiao, JD.com, Meituan, Baidu, National singing and other App have also launched extreme version, with the provincial memory, faster and better version of App quickly capture the market.

Take Meituan as an example. Last year, Meituan's minimalist version of App was launched, focusing on the procurement of fresh fruits and vegetables and lifestyle department stores, which was officially described as a "streamlined and optimized small version that runs fast and saves traffic." In terms of function alone, Meituan's very simple version places more emphasis on procurement than Meituan. At the beginning, only Meituan's preferred selection and e-commerce are retained, and in the later stage, plus takeout service, it belongs to the collection of services to the store and home.

The minimalist version is seen as a further subdivision of user demand, moving from increment to inventory when the cost of getting customers is getting higher and higher. But this year, things turned around, and the stripped-down version of Meituan could no longer be found in the app store. It was replaced by Meituan Express version of Android, in addition to the Weibo Express version, Douyin Express version and Kuaishou Express version. Product managers began to realize that extreme speed is not minimalist, and the literal meaning can not represent the actual purpose of the product.

If we compare the installation package sizes of various extreme App versions and the original version, we will find that there is not much difference between the two. Even for the extreme version of Meituan, game functions such as "getting fruit for free", "getting cash every day" and "walking to make money" are retained at the top of the home page, and some extreme versions even add other functions. Such as Douyin, Kuaishou extreme moderators promote "watch video to earn red packets" function, in fact, is a way to attract the sinking market.

At this time, we found a magical phenomenon. If the way of pushing, scanning, gift and downloading App in the past belongs to external marketing and inward drainage, then the functions in App are so rich that they are bloated, and even functions that are divorced from their own product features are readily available. Whether it is to create an extreme version or a built-in game, the result is the same: if you can't think of a good innovative idea, you can add whatever you can. In the end, people are becoming more and more alike, so let's do a stand-in application diversion.

04, Internet application ecology: mixed joys and sorrows an App features many and messy, some people say that this can not only blame the programmer, should blame the product manager. But do the planners of the product roll themselves when they are idle? Of course not.

Especially in the current era of large factory optimization becoming popular, fierce market competition coupled with severe kpi considerations, the leader said that we can not lag behind others, large platform traffic is not afraid of users without demand, so the product manager conveys the meaning to the programmer, who is passionately looking at the mountain in front of him, and then is just busy with various businesses and functions non-stop.

Abnormal market creates abnormal internal volume, and disorderly development leads to unlimited internal friction.

But in fact, the development of products to a "large and comprehensive" direction is not what the market should look like. 300 years ago, Adam Smith said: full market competition will naturally force society to carry out professional division of labor. In the current highly competitive state, the product has more and more functions, and the function is more and more fine and vertical. It is very difficult to make a universal product in this situation.

It is easier for players to enter the market from niche areas, because the smaller the things are, the greater the differences are, and the bigger the things are, the more common they are. For example, the B-end software and vertical function software in the past decade have experienced a blowout in terms of quantity and market value, and the total market value of listed software has soared from more than $70 billion to more than 650 billion.

Contradictions also break out at this moment, because narrower and more focused positioning will lower the ceiling of the vertical track. Under the circumstances that the market is generally overvalued and Internet giants are in charge, it is actually very difficult for most domestic players to survive independently. Relationship chain, mobile user accumulation and the development of traffic entrances, large factories are natural traffic pools with many users and large demand, so that for startups, being acquired has become an ideal destination. For large companies, rather than time-consuming accumulation, acquisitions are easier and faster.

Such a rule that big fish eat small fish is also applicable in specific product functions. Zhang Xiaolong believes that making connections means doing the underlying facilities of services, and the results that can be evolved based on connections are the most abundant. Functions other than timely communication in Wechat account for more than 95%, but even if you remove this 95%, Wechat is still Wechat, its dominance in the social field is unlikely to be shaken, but if you lose that 5%, Wechat will cease to exist, which is actually very much like a pony pulling a cart.

The development of Internet enterprises is very particular about sustainability, and China's App also likes to be large and comprehensive, as if a collection of thousands of functions in one can reflect the vitality of this enterprise. But those who do ecological development of Wechat should know how much bug of Wechat is, so that the update log of Wechat is always: updated some functions, fixed some problems. As for what has been repaired, they may not even know.

The trend even spread to Silicon Valley from China, where anxious Facebook started dating and recruiting; Snap joined Mini Program; and Uber marked Meituan, not satisfied with takeout, and started delivering medicine for an hour. Once Google, Facebook, Netflix and YouTube were so distinct that they could not break down competitors' barriers even across the border. Google's email, search, AI, web disk, social networking and other applications could cover the entire screen.

The previous Silicon Valley giant had better build an "application matrix" around its core business than a bloated application. But in fact, now Silicon Valley Internet companies are gradually abandoning the single-minded labels of the past and are on a par with the hodgepodge of Chinese Internet companies. EvanSpiegel, the founder of Snap, who has repeatedly rejected Zuckerberg's acquisition, has become one of the biggest supporters of Musk's WeChat theory.

According to e-Marketer data, the duration of mobile phone use has increased significantly in recent years, but users have not downloaded more App as a result. ComScore issued a report, pointing out that users' efforts to download and pay have decreased, and low-frequency App will also be cleaned to remove storage space, which is similar to the situation in China, and the number of mobile App in users' phones is approaching the saturation point.

From competing for traffic to contending for time, any platform that makes functional updates will soon be misappropriated by other platforms. Video, social, e-commerce, travel, wallet. Horizontally, this is the last resort of the Internet giant to retain users. from the vertical time dimension, from the vertical platform at the beginning of its establishment to a heavy platform, the current Super App is actually more likely to get more commercialization-you think these features are useless, but the platform no longer cares about the specific function itself.

If you know about the American rail movement in the last century, uniform and open metrics allowed the industry to prosper rapidly, but there were 186 trunk lines in the United States around 1920, and today there are only seven railway companies left. This is also the same river that most industries and products will step into, the inescapable law of industrialization: creation, dissemination, popularization, monopoly, maintenance, and obviously, the giants have reached the final stage.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: new eyes (ID:xinmouls), author | Lu Yao Editor | Sang Mingqiang

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