Chinese company takes aim at Apple, Google app stores with WeChat app

BEIJING: Tencent Holdings, China’s biggest internet company by market value, is on a collision course with Apple and Alphabet with its aggressive push into mini mobile applications, which allow users to bypass traditional app stores and run programmes directly within its WeChat application.

Tencent has re-engineered the WeChat messaging app in a way that applications smaller than 10 megabytes can run instantly on WeChat’s interface. It is now offering 580,000 mini programmes after just one year of development, compared to the 500,000 mobile apps that Apple’s App Store published from 2008 to 2012, according to Hu Renjie, WeChat’s mini programme director. “The mini programme is a brand new product model which can seamlessly link the offline and the online together,” said Hu, adding that the mini programme scheme has attracted 1 million developers.

As well as bypassing the need for app stores, mini programmes offer speed of access to users because they can be loaded instantly from within WeChat on any operating system, says a report published in South China Morning Post on Monday.

Tencent’s move to bundle apps within WeChat could hurt Apple and Alphabet as the two US tech giants rely on their own universe of apps to enrich the use of their respective iOS and Android systems.

In a measure of the size of the threat that mini programmes present, WeChat already has a user base of 980 million globally, which is larger than the population of the European Union and Russia combined.

One mini programme, the Jump Jump mobile game, attracted 400 million players in China in less than three days after becoming available on WeChat’s homepage, making it the most popular mobile game in the country.