Mobile Applications

Mobile browsing is very important in China and the latest from iResearch shows that UCWeb continues to hold a commanding lead with a 73% share of the third-party mobile browser market. The numbers from December 2012 add up to more than 100% as some people use more than one mobile browser but QQ comes second with 38% and the rest, like Baidu and Qihoo 360, share 8%. iResearch’s numbers also show that UCWeb’s mobile browser is still experiencing strong growth as is the QQ mobile browser.

Tencent's Weixin or WeChat now has 300 million subscribers. Reached in less than 2 years.

Chinese business travellers can now book their domestic travel, via their smartphones, thanks to Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) Online China. It’s the first mobile app allowing users to book a business trip at anytime, anywhere in China at the moment but there are plans to increase the functionality to include international bookings in the near future. CWT Online China also allows access to a wide range of domestic, in-country services, including booking, itinerary, changes in travel schedule and location-based information. The app cooperates with a company’s travel policy and has a built in approval process.

DianDao has rolled out apps for Android and Windows Phone, helping even more people find their way around malls and department stores. The indoor maps app claims it now covers shopping venues in 24 cities across China and is also accessible via a web app. DianDao has now mapped out the multiple floors of over 600 malls. China’s biggest search engine, Baidu, is also providing indoor maps – albeit with very limited reach in its popular Baidu Maps app. Baidu’s indoor guides are mostly in the web app, and largely at locations in Beijing and Shanghai, but they’ll surely become more prevalent in the giant’s mobile app over time. Baidu says that its online maps have 77 million users. Baidu may leave room for DianDao as it is sourcing it’s indoor maps from a pre-existing rival of the DianDao’s called Palmap.cn.  

China’s biggest web company, Tencent, has been pushing its cross-platform browser for mobiles, QQ Browser, around the world for quite some time. The QQ Browser, across its five versions (for Android, iOS, Blackberry, Symbian, and Java) has 16 million users outside of China with 90 percent based in Asia. The top 10 nations for QQ Browser usage are, in order: India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Brazil, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and the US.

Sina Weibo has launched a QR code feature which allows every user to have their own QR code. Once someone scans it, they will be brought to the owner’s profile page. This QR code usage resembles the method that was started by WeChat where everyone can create and customize their own QR code within an app.

A new Android-only app, made by anti-virus firm Kingsoft called SafeApp, effectively suppresses ads that appear within other Android apps on your phone. Almost inevitably, makers of in-app advertising platforms in the country are crying foul, and an alliance of 19 ad firms and app developers has issued a statement calling on SafeApp to be stripped of this ad-blocking function.

Jiepang is the popular check-in service for Chinese mobile users (Foursquare is banned in China) so after two years of close cooperation with Starbucks, the Chinese startup recorded over 400,000 users who have checked in to Starbucks across the Greater China region. These 409,472 users generated a total of over 810,773 check-ins, 190,000 photos attached, and 3,800 tips written on Jiepang. In 7 campaigns Starbucks have generated 263,081,746 posts to SNS services. The Starbucks branch at Raffle City Shanghai generated the most response with 24,749 check-ins and 13,052 visits. A St. Valentine’s day promotion got 14, 954 respondents with 62% females and only 38% males. Jiepang has had many partnership with various big players such as Nokia, Ikea and YiHaoDian.

Sina Weibo has launched its own version of the app Path, called Meyou (which translates to close friends in Chinese). Meyou lets people keep in close touch with chosen friends by sharing “location, photos, posts” and so on. You can log in directly with your Weibo account, and all your connections on Weibo will be automatically transferred to the app. You can message your Weibo friends from the app, just as you can do with the official Sina Weibo mobile app.

China Telecom, the state-run carrier is reportedly investing heavily to encourage in-house innovation with the setup of two internal innovation incubators in Beijing and Shanghai. A big step for a Chinese state-run company. The largest landline operator on the planet will earmark about US$ 30 million for its ‘satellite’ start up plan.    China Telecom isn’t being constrained by its history, tradition and huge payroll as many other Chinese state-run companies are, and has been shoving itself into the cutting-edge technology trends. Earlier this month, the Chinese carrier co-hosted a “Mobile Internet Apps Creative Competition 2011’” with Tencent and Motorola in an aim to attract more 3^rd party developers and creative-thinking apps for its own app store Tianyi Kongjian (189store.com). Yang Xiaowei, Deputy GM of China Telecom said in a keynote during the conference that the company is to attach much importance to mobile internet in the time to come and will restructure its internal organization to bring out more innovation. As of last November, China Telecom grabbed more than 125 million subscribers under its e-surfing (Tianyi) branding while 34 million of which are 3G users. And its data services recorded a 120% rise in revenue, outrunning its SMS and MMS services.

China ranked second globally in Christmas week downloads of mobile apps according to statistics by mobile app researcher Flurry. The U.S. topped the chart with more than 509 million downloads, representing over 50% of total downloads. China came in second with 99 million while the UK came in third with about 81 million downloads. Other countries which made it to the chart are Canada (3rd), German (4th) and France (5th). The app, like the website, catalogues licensed TV shows, cartoons, documentaries and movies – including hits from the US, Korea, and China – that are linked from China’s chief video-streaming sites, such as Youku , Tudou,  PPTV, and Baidu’s recently re-named iQiyi. So although the VeryCD app doesn’t have the polish of some of those separate apps – or some of their unique features – it’s a very useful portal that aggregates some of the best content that can be streamed in mainland China.

 VeryCD has launched an iPhone application recently completing the site’s turnaround from a notorious pirate BBS to one of China’s biggest music and movie aggregator sites. There’s an Android version in the works as well.

The 360 Fashion Social News app has been pre-loaded on all Nokia N9 handsets in China. The app will allow users to view the look-books, catalogues and collections from fashion designers from around the world. It also has a Twitter & Chinese Weibo client which searches for fashion conversation surrounding the fashion brand, and allows the user to leave their own comments after logging on to interact with the conversation.

Sina is to launch a new free map-oriented, location-based app for Chinese drivers. The iMap app does five main things, and has social integration with many of them. It can be used for finding gas stations, parking spaces, getting routes and traffic build-up guidance, making crowd-sourced route reports and it  has a parking assistant. Baidu’s Shenbian does the first 2 already, with listings and reviews of nearby relevant places. Live traffic data is only currently supported in 11 Chinese cities. iMap allows users to tweet out their reviews of petrol stations or anything else without having to open the Weibo app on your phone.

The smartphone-orientated and Chinese-made UC Browser as the clear leader with a 76.42 percent market share of total time spent across all mobile browsers in China. In second place is the QQ Browser, which is run by Tencent, at 17.32 percent. Baidu’s Mobile Browser, which got a major makeover recently, only gets a one percent market share.

More people use mobile phones to surf the internet in China than use desktop devices. Mobile internet users hit 388 million compared to the desktop user count of 380 million.

·         There are multiple ways whereby users can download mobile apps in China — through a third-party app store, bulletin board, or search. For iOS users, the legal way is to download (and pay) through the app store. Jailbreaking your iPhone is perhaps the more popular but illegal way of downloading apps.

·         For Android, most development firms publish their apps on various stores and sites. Sure there is Google Play; but more importantly there are also third-party Android app stores too which serve as an important distribution channel for developers. Most Chinese developers choose to provide the ‘.apk’ download files, bypassing Google’s Play store anyway.

·         There are more female than male mobile app users (52.2 vs 47.8 percent). And perhaps thanks to the availability of cheaper smartphones, there are also more users from the less educated sectors of society.

·         Folks who use Baidu in China (who are the majority of web users), will search and downloads apps directly from the search results, thanks to Baidu’s box computing system. Search is still the largest source of app downloads, followed by users who head straight to a third-party app website for downloads. Visiting official app stores for downloads ranks third, which is pretty decent.

·         Wandoujia (SnapPea in English) is the top third-party app store for Android users in China in terms of market share. iMobile, on the other hand, is the top mobile app and forum site in China.

·         In 2012, Chinese users are more willing to pay for app content, especially digital content like e-books, games, music, and anti-virus apps. Though we know they aren’t willing to pay that much for e-books, just $0.50.

·         For apps that have been downloaded, chat, web surfing, and games/entertainment apps are most frequently used. Maps and dictionary apps aren’t used as frequently.

Chinese company 8684 has just reached five million users for just one of its series of travel and transportation apps, the bus app.“86″ is the telephone country code for China, and “84″ stands for “bus” (in Chinese “84″ sounds like “bus”).

Reports suggest that WeChat now has more overseas users than Chinese ones. Unusually for a Chinese application, the Whatsapp-esque group messaging app has proved to be popular internationally. WeChat has around 200 million users, less than parent company Tencent’s QQ service but global expansion is unprecedented.

Shanghai Didatour International Travel Service Co., Ltd, have two well-received apps BingDian Jiudiankong (Hotel Master) and Jiudian Bingdianjia (Hotel Discounts). Their first, Hotel Master, had 500,000 downloads in it’s first 150 days earlier this year. It also topped the travel chart of Apple’s China App Store for a week. Hotel Discounts is a spin-off based on the “priceline model” – where users name their own price. Users set a target price for a hotel room and let the hotels bid for the deal. For the less price sensitive customer, Hotel Master integrates the loyalty cards of top-end hotels and business travellers can make reservations directly from the app.

Ikamobile, the maker of mobile applications- Hotel Finder, Movie Finder, Car Finder and Train Finder has integrated all those apps into one mega solution- Chumener. It offers a complete travel solution and with the accumulated user data, Chumener can make intelligent recommendations for users. To deliver so many functions in one package Chumener is partnering with well-established service providers in different fields, e.g. Chumener partners with eLong for hotel bookings.

Baidu is pushing into the Thailand web market with a new version of one of its Windows PC apps. Called Baidu PC Faster, it’s designed to keep users’ computers feeling fresh and speedy and has just been bumped up to v2.0. v2.0 adds things like a USB Guard for full scanning of thumb drives and full Thai language support in the app. Baidu has also released an anti-virus app for Thai netizens with Thailand being it’s first overseas markets for these free anti-virus apps. But this is about more than just an app, as the Beijing-based firm is clearly making a slow-but-steady expansion in the Southeast Asia region – starting initially with Thailand and Vietnam. In both those countries, Baidu has launched a handful of PC apps, and also some web products, such as localized versions of its Hao123 links portal but Baidu has met with resistance in Vietnam, mainly on nationalistic grounds over disputed island territories. It’s reception in Thailand seems to be warmer, so far.