#Douyin chinese douyin china wechat pay Offline#

Though Tencent's apps, WeChat included, still captured most user attention in 2020, compared with 2019, Chinese smartphone users were spending more time on ByteDance's apps, including Douyin, and spending less time than they previously had on Tencent products, according to QuestMobile.ĭouyin is particularly popular among China's youth. Douyin has amassed 550 million monthly active users. Douyin and its international counterpart TikTok have routinely topped the global chart of the most downloaded non-game app in Apple's App Store since 2018.

Meanwhile, netizens are increasingly shifting their attention away from WeChat and toward Douyin, a completely different ecosystem. In early February, Douyin brought a lawsuit against Tencent, accusing WeChat of blocking Douyin content. Last year, WeChat launched its own short-video feature, a deliberate challenge to Douyin and Kuaishou. ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming and Tencent founder Pony Ma were caught bickering publicly on WeChat in 2018 Zhang accused WeChat of blocking and plagiarizing Douyin, which ByteDance owns, and Ma countered that Zhang's accusation was libel. But some say Douyin is the top contender.ĭouyin's not even five years old, but it has already been feuding with WeChat for about three. 'Failures don't sway them from trying new things, even in ventures that may not make sense to third-party observers,' Man-Chung Cheung, a research analyst at eMarketer, a New York-based market research company, told Protocol.Īnalysts are generally divided on who's most likely to take the throne from WeChat, or at least share the throne. Afraid of missing the next must-win market, Chinese tech giants tend to add ever more functions to get existing users hooked. In other words, there aren't a whole lot of web users who remain untapped. Almost every Chinese netizen already uses mobile apps designed by Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu, according to market research firm QuestMobile. China now has nearly 1 billion internet users, representing about 70% of the country's total population. China's online population growth has slowed after a decade of mobile internet expansion. It's unsurprising that each popular Chinese mobile app is building a larger footprint, be it a short-video platform, a delivery service or an online marketplace. 'It will also further build the cottage industries that come from supporting these apps.' Why does every Chinese app want to be WeChat? Competition creates more innovation and generally more competitive rates and conditions for everyone involved except the tech giants,' said Mark Tanner, managing director of Shanghai-based China Skinny, a marketing and research agency. 'An app ecosystem that is more diverse is healthy for everyone. And a slew of tech companies are adding a mobile wallet feature. Douyin nemesis Kuaishou is already turning into a communication channel and building a 'local life' business center. Meituan is said to be testing a group chat feature.

This means China may end up with more than one mega app, each favored by different demographics.ĭouyin is hardly the only app that's expanding beyond its core business. Tech analysts can't agree on who will take over the throne from WeChat, but they anticipate that WeChat's status as the super app won't survive Beijing's ongoing antitrust drive. The question now is whether anyone can dethrone it.īy nature, Chinese tech companies do not feel encumbered by their 'core competencies.' And Chinese web users are accustomed to mega apps that do a lot of different things. In the past decade, WeChat has transformed human interaction in China and grown into an ecosystem for innovation, making it virtually the sole super-app most of China can't live without. Instead, it's one of several Chinese apps engaged in a quiet, high-stakes battle to become the next WeChat, a mega app that now has 1.1 billion monthly active users, 80% of China's total population. It's clear that the young Douyin is not content to be just an entertainment app, however lucrative that may be.

#Douyin chinese douyin china wechat pay Offline#

Now Douyin has expanded into the so-called 'local life services,' taking on Meituan, a dominant player in this space, which offers a wide range of services meeting users' offline life needs, from food delivery to ticket booking. It's part of a pattern: Over the past few years, Douyin has beefed up its social network by adding features from livestreaming to ecommerce, from gaming to instant messaging, challenging existing dominant players in each vertical. In March, Douyin users in three Chinese cities discovered that the popular short-video app had quietly launched a new Groupon-like feature, a 'group buying' feed that allowed users to order takeout, book hotels and reserve tickets and services.