In a conference call after Tencent’s earnings release, in response to market buzz about AI and ChatGPT-related topics, Tencent executives said that for Tencent, AI and big models are a growth gas pedal that will help improve existing businesses and accelerate commercialization and that Tencent will further invest in resources to build Tencent’s own big models while ensuring that the foundation for model construction is well established.

Tencent executives also said that generative AI can be used to improve the user experience of Tencent’s flagship products. In the future, every user may have an AI assistant, and if the results are good, it is possible that generative AI will be incorporated into WeChat and QQ.

Tencent executives said that the commercialization of video numbers is still in the early stages and that it is expanding the commercialization opportunities for video numbers and cultivating other new revenue sources, such as live e-commerce, which “I believe is a good opportunity” and is currently building infrastructure for live e-commerce to drive total payment volume up.

The post Tencent executives talk about “generative AI” appeared first on TechGoing.

Each user can enjoy the offer once only. This activity is powered by Tencent Top-up, and the offer can only be used for a top-up on designated pages.

The post WeChat Pay Apple App Store 10% discount RMB100 off RMB1000 appeared first on TechGoing.

The official changelog is.

• Resolved some known issues.

Last update.

• Fixes iOS 16 compatibility issues.
• Fixed compatibility issues with iPhone 14 series.
• Fixed a number of known issues.

It is unclear what other feature improvements are available in WeChat iOS release 8.0.31, however, it appears that the image and video drag and drop one-click send feature introduced in WeChat iOS beta 8.0.31 has been cut and cannot be triggered in the official release.

The post WeChat iOS 8.0.31 latest official download released: pictures, video dragging one-click appeared first on TechGoing.

In this version, videos in MP4 and MOV formats can be played online in WeChat; document tables support pivot tables and more types of charts can be inserted in tables; chat supports translation of web content, session list supports left slide to delete sessions, exit from group chat can be accompanied by clearing chat history at the same time, support for batch cleaning of exited Group chats can be cleared in batch in Settings – General – Storage.

Here are the updates.

Efficiency tools and basic optimization

Documents

• Tables support pivot tables, simply drag and drop to analyze and summarize data based on specified dimensions.
• Inserting charts into tables supports switching between scatter, area, map, combination, and more types.

Calendar

• Rich text editing is now supported for calendar descriptions, making it easy to fill in and edit richer content.

microdisk

• No need to download files, MP4, MOV and other formats of video can be played online now.
• Weiban files can be forwarded to chat, and chat members can be granted permission quickly, making file sharing more convenient.

Mailbox

• You can add tags to emails, and easily classify emails.

clock in

• The home page shows the daily clocking status and the number of abnormal days per month, so it is more convenient to make up cards and take leave.

Basic chat experience optimization

• Support translation of web content, more efficient for multilingual offices.
• The session list now supports a left swipe to delete sessions.
• You can preview local files online even after you turn on iOS lock mode.
• When you quit a group chat, you can clear the chat history at the same time.
• Batch cleaning of quitted group chats is now supported in “Settings – General – Storage”.

The post WeChat iOS version 4.0.20 released: quit group chat, supports more video format online playback appeared first on TechGoing.

At present, WeChat itself does not have customer service directly for this product. Users need to find a separate WeChat customer service in the “Tencent Customer Service” applet, and then find “WeChat” in order to talk to the robot and give feedback. If manual customer service is required, the manual customer service transfer button is required, but it is only transferred to the interface of WeChat question message.

In July last year, WeChat also conducted an internal test of the “WeChat customer service” function, but this is not the customer service that ordinary consumers think. Its positioning is the same as the public account and video account, and it has independent business attributes. According to the official introduction, users can access WeChat customer service in various scenarios inside and outside WeChat, users can initiate inquiries, and enterprises can reply to messages through the API interface to provide good customer service. It can be seen from this that the WeChat customer service function is currently a service function launched for enterprise users.

Tencent is not without human customer service. Tencent has three different types of customer service numbers, which can be obtained with a simple search. But the problem is that most users can only find robot customer service that is not very intelligent, and the human customer service is hidden deeply. This may be done for the sake of reducing costs. According to relevant data released by Tencent, in 2019, the number of users of Tencent’s customer service reached nearly 300 million and the number of services exceeded 800 million, of which the ratio of intelligent self-service reached more than 90%. In other words, less than 10% of users resolve issues through human customer service.

The post Tencent has successfully registered the “WeChat Customer Service” trademark appeared first on TechGoing.

The official changelog is.

Fix some known problems.

The last WeChat Android release was 8.0.28, which was released on September 16, but this time WeChat skipped version 8.0.29 and released WeChat Android 8.0.30 directly.

In the latest version of WeChat, the WeChat status has been changed. It supports custom-filling status words, including using custom emoticons.

Some users of the WeChat plug-in have been pushed “WeChat Keyboard”, which is the official Chinese input method of WeChat.

The post WeChat Android 8.0.30 latest official version download released appeared first on TechGoing.

The updated content.

• New handwriting word search function
• Adjustable key tone size
• Optimized numeric security keyboard
• New visual optimization of common language

▲ Screenshot of the TestFlight internal test invitation for iOS (only eligible to participate)

The new version of the keyboard will be available for iOS, and the new version will be available for iOS.

The post WeChat Keyboard iOS beta version v0.9.0.266 released: New handwriting word search appeared first on TechGoing.

In 3.8.0, WeChat has also updated its group feature, which allows you to share group chats when inviting people into a group, and allows group administrators to top group messages. As usual, WeChat 3.8.0 also fixes some known issues.

Previously, WeChat supported migrating chats between computers and phones in version 3.7.6, allowing you to view the merged chats on your phone or computer after migration.

As a national social app, WeChat and WeChat had 1.299 billion monthly active users as of June 30, 2022, up 3.8% year-over-year.

The post WeChat Windows PC version 3.8.0 released: support translating text content from images appeared first on TechGoing.

“In 11 years, 108 versions have been updated, and the installation package has soared from 457KB to 257MB, a difference of 575 times.” Some time ago, a blogger disassembled the installation package and found that compared to the 199 files in the 1.0 version of WeChat, the number is now over 12,600. The increasingly bloated WeChat has also been criticized for the fact that about 90% of the updates are not used.

From a small but beautiful IM product to a national app with more than 1.1 billion daily activities, WeChat now encompasses more ecology and thus aggregates more functions, including but not limited to top-ups, shopping, money management, taxi, ticketing, video, and applets. On the contrary, the core chat function takes up the least space, unless you store a lot of graphics.

Back in time last year, at the WeChat 10th anniversary open class, facing the same skepticism, Zhang Xiaolong still said, “WeChat is still a small and beautiful product, it’s almost as simple as it was ten years ago.” As an egg, the official at the meeting revealed that the team is developing an input method, this product was also released not long ago, but after installation can occupy 650MB storage WeChat keyboard, 2-5 times larger than other similar products, so some netizens tease, which may be compressed a “Warcraft 3”.

The product managers of the Internet seem to have figured out the siphoning effect, and they are well versed in the function of superposition, so much so that Musk threatened to learn from WeChat when he gave a class to the entire Twitter team last year to make an all-inclusive super app. App.

But do users really need all these feature optimizations and additions? Not necessarily.

For example, as big as Taobao embedded all kinds of mini-games, QQ in the demolition of an Unreal 4 engine, Baidu App test water for several years of e-commerce business, Alipay included all the life services, Meituan’s home page actually recommended reading novels; small to music listening App, can live, watch the small video, shopping, but also can set a dynamic wallpaper and order takeout, even if you play a sheep, in order to get props also have to watch a variety of ads.

Although their purpose may be to attract traffic, retention rate and advertising fees, it does not prevent us from recognizing: the steep increase of these fragmented functions has not brought more users and high activity, and some Apps even took the road of no return as a result.

According to Steve Jobs’ understanding, a good product should walk at the intersection of technology and humanities, but in China, product managers do not find the boundary from this set of laws, instead, it has become: the smaller the product the greater the difference, the greater the commonality of something bigger. Compared with reopening a vertical product, based on the original application soil, injecting more boards and possibilities, making it bigger and more comprehensive to become a super software has inexplicably become the business consensus of all players.

In such an era when features are no longer scarce, distinctive standalone products have become rare, and SaaS companies in Silicon Valley are the best example. To the domestic, everyone’s solution is to do ecology, big fish eat small fish, small fish eat shrimp, such as large companies to the refinement of small businesses original, through the development of standards open interface linkage together, a small program is the same reason. But this approach also brings a new problem: who will lead, and what makes you lead?

01, how many features to add to a product to become a junk
Time rewind to 2007, Steve Jobs launched the first generation of the iPhone, when he did not want to install applications on the smartphone, but to see the phone as a terminal for cloud services, through the browser search to access the site, because at that time the phone in computing, range, storage and other capabilities are very poor performance. But it was not to be, and the next year he found that the network speed for accessing the web was too slow, and the Appstore was released the same year, at which point Apple began to work on building an application ecosystem.

Three years later Wired pointed out in an article, “The Web is Dead, the Internet is Alive,” that “one of the biggest changes in the digital space over the past few years has been the transition from an open Internet to a semi-closed web platform.” These platforms brought a variety of apps to smartphones, and as more and more people used apps, the latter offered services that made users focus less on the search itself and more on access.

The article argued that apps were replacing the Web and that Apple’s “iTunes+App” model was ushering in a new era for the Internet. This was indeed the case, as the year 2010 was the nexus of the mobile Internet explosion, with the birth of the iPhone 4 and the subsequent explosion of the App market in both quantity and volume.

This year, the emergence of mobile social software Kik disrupted text messaging and exceeded 1 million users within 15 days of its launch, and the news spread across the ocean to China, prompting a butterfly effect. So, when WeChat emerged, besides MiChat, Fetion, EaseNews, Wangxin, and other IM players such as Speed Chat and Youxin participated in the “Thousand Letter War”.

Two months before the launch of WeChat, Zhang Xiaolong posted a lot of product thinking dynamics on the rice noodle, including the famous line “How many functions do you have to add to a product to make it a piece of junk.” Even if it does not have the first-mover advantage, Tencent’s entry is still not to be underestimated. The result is a prophecy.

The 1.0 version of WeChat, with a single function, did not make much of a splash at the time. It was not until the launch of functions such as shake and drift bottle, plus the transfer of traffic from PC to mobile and the strategic relinquishment of QQ, that the simple and clear functions met people’s needs and users began to shift. By November 2013, the number of registered users of WeChat exceeded 600 million, making it the largest IM software in Asia.

At that time, smartphones had just become popular, and the Internet giants represented by Tencent and Ali aimed at cell phone mobile clients, each began to encircle the land and seize the entrance, Ali pushed the cell phone Taobao, Tencent expanded the WeChat payment ecosystem, 360 strengthened the investment and strategic layout of mobile applications, and the big manufacturers were busy adjusting the structure, and it was a lively time.

“I’m nervous to see WeChat.” At an IT leadership summit, Jack Ma said to Ma Huateng, that, Ali has a business chain, Tencent occupies the user social, Baidu circles the traffic, with the three BAT divisions Jin’s boundary is broken, the high frequency of smartphones let their eye on each other’s territory.

According to related media reports, in 2013, Alibaba’s internal mobile Internet development products reached nearly 30, in addition to Wangxin, to and fro, Handao, Alipay, O2O and other local life mobile applications are also the focus of development plans. In addition to Sina Weibo, Ali also invested in Stranger, Fast and other companies, and spent $80 million to acquire Youmeng, a mobile application service platform, to make up for the social and mobile shortcomings.

But even so, as the person in charge at the time, Zeng Ming said: Ali has not yet found a unified mobile user platform. Meaning that for a period of time, Alibaba’s mobile products were still divided into functions, with differences in functionality between different products, allowing them to strike at a single point.

At this stage, the players realized that the cost of jumping between apps was much higher than the hyperlinks in the Web era. While the mobile Internet allows products to aggregate more in-depth information, the high walls between each other are also being reconstructed: Ali’s applications have blocked WeChat in its entirety, and WeChat has blocked Taobao’s promotional links. Google, which relies on the principle of openness, has been declining.

All-in-one and Best of the breed were on opposite ends of the scale, and the market and players preferred the latter.

At that time, although the size of most mainstream apps in China increased from kb to MB, they were all controlled within 5MB, and the memory space of cell phones was basically maintained at about 16-32G, which people could not use up at all. This also means that most of the apps at that time had distinctive personalities and unified internal functions, and there were almost no non-essential functions in the platform, there was no need for mutual wake-up and background activity, and there was no unreasonable file storage mechanism.

2. To be the rule maker of the game
   The inflection point appeared in 2017, as the three major operators reduced traffic tariffs, the number of mobile Internet users approaching 1 billion, hardware updates, release of storage space, social, entertainment, office and other functions in one, the smartphone has undergone a role change from a tool to an electronic organ.

According to QuestMobile data, against the background of the peak of mobile Internet traffic dividend, as of the first half of 2018, the number of apps on the market in China exceeded 4.06 million, and from the perspective of users, 35 Apps can already meet most of the needs. The size of the app is also expanding rapidly.

Distribution of the number of apps installed by Chinese mobile netizens from 2017 to 2018, source QuestMobile

The typical example is still WeChat. After the withdrawal of players such as Fetion and NetEase Bubble, WeChat, which is a multi-tasker in communication, payment, circle of friends and public number, does still retain the gene of “use it and go”, but with the release of the “Jump” game and the official opening of WeChat’s third-party small programs, various functions have been inlaid, and the concept of the platform to ecological transformation has also emerged. The concept of a platform to ecology transformation has also emerged.

From the underlying logic of the product itself, the product is a collection of functions, and the extension and transformation of functions cannot be separated from the path of using high frequency to bring low frequency and using just demand to bring non-just demand. For example, no matter how to change, the chat function of WeChat is always in the dimension of high-frequency and immediate needs, and instant messaging occupies the first two of the four tabs.

High-frequency functions need to facilitate user access, shorten the user’s path, and build a functional ecology based on core functions. You will find that the entrance of features like friends circle and applets will be deeper, but since WeChat itself is a huge traffic entrance, these features don’t need to worry about no users.

A developer once lamented in a blog, “Now it is already the world of BAT, the space for App independent survival is constantly squeezed, and time is running out for independent App to occupy the market position.” After many rounds of verification, the most important entrances are still stable, such as e-commerce, entertainment, local life and other App heads, which also means that the App pattern is gradually stable, so the BAT majors began to open small programs and various entrances to retain customers with the advantages of their mainstream App.

Although the mouths are saying that they promote openness, in terms of product use, ecology means both convenience and a new round of self-enclosure and business closure. The final winners all want to achieve unification because they know that once they become ubiquitous, they also become the rule makers of the game.

Therefore, when WeChat, Alipay, Meituan and other core apps gain absolute control over traffic, on the one hand, they need to fatten up their functions; on the other hand, super apps can connect with other apps of the same system and empower them, for example, WeChat connects everything at the same time, and the infinitely expanding boundaries also create more cash possibilities for themselves.

03、The products with unclear strategies are all pits
As the originator of the smartphone, the iPhone 4 memory of the three versions are: 512MB + 8GB, 512MB + 16GB and 512MB + 32GB. 16GB memory of the past era of cell phones, has gone, replaced by 8GB + 256GB, or even 12GB + 512GB of the huge memory volume.

According to QuestMobile data, if MAU exceeds 100 million as the standard for “must-have” apps, there are now 25 apps that exceed the standard line, covering communication, e-commerce, maps, short videos, information, browsers, local life, games and other corners of life. On this basis, as mentioned earlier, the memory consumption of the app on the device is at the stage of continuous expansion, and the most obvious manifestation is the overlapping and bloating of functions.

As early as a few years ago, someone launched a green app pact to solve the problem of app bloat, and later the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology led the establishment of a unified push alliance, aiming to reduce the irrelevant code and functions added by apps specifically for pushing messages, but these have not played a big role, and few actual responses.

At the Baidu World Congress in 2013, Baidu first launched the light application model, using the search box to directly search the App to achieve instant search and use, this model has not been consistently attached to but can be considered the predecessor of the applet, but the applet to platform endorsement, especially for players, they believe that the operation, payment and other processes entrusted to the applet, is tantamount to half a life to Tencent.

So how can we achieve the double insurance of lightness and security?

In fact, we have all experienced this change firsthand. Since 2018, a wave of speedy versions of the mobile Internet track has been blowing up, since the launch of the speedy version of the App by Racer, today’s headlines, Jingdong, Meituan, Baidu, National K Song and other App, have also launched the speedy version, playing the memory-saving, faster and better speedy version of the App to quickly capture the market.

Take Meituan as an example, last year Meituan’s minimalist version App was launched, focusing on fruit and vegetable fresh food and life department purchase, officially described as “a small version of streamlined and optimized, running fast and saving traffic”. In terms of function alone, the minimal version of Meituan emphasizes procurement more than Meituan, and at the beginning, it only kept two major sections, Meituan Premium and e-commerce, and later added take-out service, which is a collection of in-store and home-based services.

The minimalist version is seen as a further segmentation of the user’s usage needs, running from incremental to stock in the face of increasingly high customer acquisition costs. But this year, things have reversed, the app store can no longer find the Meituan Lite version, replaced by the Meituan Extreme version for Android, in addition to this, there are also Microblog Extreme version, Jitterbit Extreme version and Racer Extreme version, product managers began to realize that the extreme speed is not the extreme simplicity, the literal meaning does not represent the actual purpose of the product.

If we compare the size of the installation package of each type of Speedy App and the original version, we will find that there is not much difference between the two. Even for the speedy version of Meituan, the top of the app home page retains the game functions such as “free fruit”, “daily cash” and “walk for money”, and some of the speedy version apps even of the speedy version of the application even added other functions, such as Jitterbug, Racer speedy version of the main push “watch the video to earn red packets” function, in fact, is to attract the sinking market a way to play.

At this point we found an amazing phenomenon, if we say that in the past, the way of ground promotion, sweeping the code to send gifts to download the App belongs to outward marketing, inward flow, then now the App is rich in features to bloated, even out of its own product features are also full of features, whether to create the speedy version or built-in games, the result is the same way: can not think of good innovative ideas, so simply add all that can be added, and finally We do more and more like, that will be divided and do a stand-in application infusion.

04、Internet application ecology: mixed feelings
An App has a lot of features and chaos, some people say that this can not be blamed only on the programmer, should be blamed on the product manager. But the planning product is idle to roll their own? Of course not.

Especially in the current era when optimization of large factories is in vogue, the fierce market competition coupled with the severe KPI test, the leader said that we can’t lag behind what others have, and the large platform has traffic not afraid of users without demand, so the product manager conveyed the meaning to the programmer, who looked at the mountain in front of him, and then, he just kept busy with various businesses and functions.

The deformed market creates a deformed internal volume, disorderly development leads to infinite internal consumption.

But in fact, the development of products in the direction of “big and comprehensive” is not the way the market should be. 300 years ago, Adam Smith said: “Adequate market competition will naturally force society to carry out the professional division of labor. In the current highly competitive state, product functions are becoming more and more fine and vertical, and it is very difficult to make a universal product in this situation.

Players entering the market are more likely to enter the market from the segmentation, because the smaller the difference, the greater the commonality of the larger things. For example, in the past decade of B-side software, vertical functional software in the number and market value have experienced a blowout, the total market value of listed software from more than $ 70 billion soared to more than 650 billion.

Contradictions also erupted at this moment, because narrower, more focused positioning, will be the ceiling of the vertical track lower, in the market is generally overestimated and the Internet giants sitting, most of the domestic players are actually difficult to survive independently, the relationship chain, mobile user accumulation and the development of traffic entrance, the big manufacturers are the natural flow pool, more users, demand, so much so that for startups, was acquired into the ideal For large companies, instead of time-consuming accumulation, the acquisition is easier and faster.

Zhang Xiaolong believes that making connections means making the underlying facilities for services, and the results that can evolve based on connections are the richest. WeChat’s functions other than timely communication account for more than 95%, but if we remove the 95%, WeChat is still WeChat, and its dominant position in the social field is unlikely to be shaken, but if we lose the 5%, WeChat will cease to exist, which is actually very much like the role of a small horse-drawn car.

The development of Internet companies is very much about sustainability, and Chinese apps also like to be big and comprehensive, as if a set of thousands of functions in order to reflect the vitality of the enterprise. But those who have been developing in the WeChat ecosystem should know how many bugs WeChat has, so much so that WeChat’s changelog is always: updating some features and fixing some problems. As for what has been fixed, they themselves may not even know.

This trend is even scraped from the domestic to Silicon Valley, anxious Facebook to do dating and recruitment; Snap joined the small program; Uber benchmarked up to Meituan, not satisfied with take-out, began to one-hour delivery of drugs. Once Google, Facebook, and Nifty, tubing clear-cut, even cross-border can not break the barriers of rivals, Google’s mailbox, search, AI, Netflix, social and other applications can spread the whole screen.

Previously, the Silicon Valley giants, compared to a bloated application, rather than build a “matrix of applications” around the core business. But in fact, Silicon Valley Internet companies are now gradually abandoning their past exclusivity label and moving towards the hodgepodge of Chinese Internet majors, with Snap founder Evan Spiegel, who has repeatedly rejected Zuckerberg’s acquisitions, becoming one of the biggest names in Musk’s “WeChat theory.

According to e-Marketer data, the number of hours users spend on their phones has increased significantly over the past few years, but users are not downloading more apps as a result. comScore released a report stating that users are less likely to download and pay for apps and that low-frequency apps are being cleaned up and moved out of storage, much like the situation in China, where the number of mobile apps on users’ phones is approaching saturation point. The number of mobile apps in users’ phones is approaching the saturation point.

From competing for traffic to competing for time, any platform that makes functional updates will soon be appropriated by other platforms. Video, social, e-commerce, travel, wallet …… Horizontally, this is the last resort of the Internet giants to retain users, from the vertical time dimension, from the inception of the pendant platform, transformed into a heavy platform, now the super App actually more to get more commercialization may — you think these features are useless, but the platform care is no longer the specific features itself.

If you know anything about the American railroad movement of the last century, uniformity and open metrics allowed the industry to boom quickly, but there were 186 mainline railroads in the U.S. circa 1920, and today there are only seven railroads left. This is the same river that most industries and products tread, the inescapable laws of industrialization: create, spread, popularize, monopolize, maintain, and it is clear that the giants have reached the final stage.

The post The decline of internet application software: the era of super APP is over? appeared first on TechGoing.

Now, with iOS 16.1 about to be officially pushed out, Apple is finally allowing developers to submit apps to the App Store that support new features such as Dynamic Island, which will finally allow WeChat to use Dynamic Island.

It is reported that developers are now able to use the new Live Activity API in their apps to display rich information content in Lively Island and the iOS 16 lock screen interface, which will help improve the user interaction experience.

However, developers should also be aware that after April 2023, all apps submitted to the App Store must be built using the Xcode 14.1 and iOS 16.1 SDKs, at which point apps that do not support the new version will not be taken down, but will not be able to continue to iterate and update properly.

The post WeChat developers submit application versions that support Dynamic Island appeared first on TechGoing.