
Chinese Mobile UI Trends - dangrover
http://dangrover.com/blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-trends.html
======
chatmasta
I spent a summer in Taiwan, half learning Chinese and half working on a
startup.

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]

[0]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O89M3CYd8RU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O89M3CYd8RU)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
What is LINE? I've lived in Beijing for 7 years and never heard of it. Taiwan
is more like Japan than China.

~~~
chatmasta
LINE app. Direct [0], wiki [1].

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.

[0] [http://line.me/en/](http://line.me/en/)

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_%28application%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_%28application%29)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I think this is blocked in China so WeChat can have the market. This is what
you must know about the China market: it is closed to foreigners.

~~~
chatmasta
Yeah, I wrote a 15-page paper on this for my "next china" economics class. My
thesis was that although the primary purpose of the Great Firewall appears
political, with a goal of censorship, in actuality the CCP keeps it around for
economic reasons. Effectively, the GFW is a way of subsidizing domestic tech
companies. As long as it exists, it keeps foreign competitors at bay while
domestic counterparts launch their own services, often in conduit with the CCP
censorship authorities.

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.

~~~
est
Well, a counter example is eBay, Paypal, Amazon did not compete well in China
regardless of GFW.

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)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
We use Amazon a lot, along with JD and sometimes even Taobao. I don't think
Amazon has failed in China at all.

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.

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peferron
QQ's emoticons (the 70-or-so yellow base set plus a few others) are indeed
incredible. Somehow, for _every single feeling_ you want to convey at any time
of the day, you will find _one and exactly one_ matching icon. It's like they
created a perfect bijection. And they did this while keeping the icons
perfectly readable on small low-resolution screens, and with animation frames
you can count on one hand. I have no idea who the original artists are but
they have my eternal respect.

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).

~~~
mdda
The reason that the emoticons are so well targeted is not for the users
themselves. If someone includes one of the emoticons, it makes machine-
identification of sentiment trivial (compared to reading and interpreting the
text).

(not sure whether this is something that everyone knows already : Perhaps I
only just got the news... (Presuming this is actually true, of course))

~~~
thaumasiotes
It isn't true; different people assign different meanings to the same
emoticon.

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floatrock
The most interesting pieces to me are the ones that work to bypass the walled
gardens: the in-app third-party app stores with OTA installs, and the in-app
wallets.

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?

~~~
thaumasiotes
I suspect, but am not totally sure, that vendors jailbreak the phones before
you buy them. At least, when I bought a nexus S in China in 2011 (I think),
the bootloader was already unlocked and it had had a ton of chinese crapware
preinstalled onto it.

------
kszx
My impression is that applications for Pinyin text input have advanced to a
level where they can be used _really_ quickly, often faster than English. They
also allow for fuzzy input and dialect-related mistakes.

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.)

------
exelius
This is quite interesting, as the divergence between east and west seems to
become more pronounced over time, not less. The divergence in mobile UI styles
have given rise to entire classes of apps in China that would find no market
in the west. Indeed, I doubt many of these would find a market even in Japan
(which has similar text entry problems, though somewhat ameliorated by the
existence of the hiragana alphabet).

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).

~~~
objclxt
There are already numerous forks of Android in China that replace Google
services with local equivalents (handsets from Xiaomi, for example, come with
their own fork).

~~~
exelius
Right; I mean more than just a fork that replaces Google services. The author
seems to lament that text entry services provided by the big Chinese search
engines are not available throughout the OS. Text entry seems to be a huge
problem in general in China, and from a strategy standpoint it seems to be
almost inextricably linked to the discovery function.

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.

------
chatmasta
How about this trend?

\- 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.

~~~
virmundi
I think that those stats are good reason to focus on that market. I wonder if
I would have to have a native Chinese individual to help. The character system
employed in their language is so different from a latin based scheme as to be
laughable. The site presents interesting differences, but I think Western
developers need an English version of UXPin recommendations for Eastern apps.

------
monkeypizza
I hope he writes about wechat's grouping function, which is taking off like
crazy now.

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.

~~~
wodenokoto
This is exactly how groups work in Facebook Chat, though there is not so much
culture about them.

------
jobu
The QR Code login idea is awesome:

 _" 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.

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Wogef
We get a fair share of bullshit China speculation on HN- this article is
absolutely spot on in every respect.

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.

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AndrewKemendo
China is a huge and my guess underserved tech market. I wonder how much of the
HN crowd is working on Chinese applications - likely selection bias would mean
not that many.

~~~
chatmasta
I am. The key is having a partner already in the market.

~~~
keda
Is it VPN related business mentioned in your profile?

~~~
chatmasta
Yes - feel free to email me if you're curious.

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ape4
Sound like every app wants to do everything ... including payments and its own
walled garden.

~~~
erikb
That's the Chinese way. One APP (Ey Pee Pee) to rule them all!

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malditojavi
bookmark'd!

