“China’s WeChat saluted Apple Inc. Monday on the iPhone’s 10th anniversary — just as it unveiled a new app platform that could challenge Apple in the decade to come,” Yang Jie and Eva Dou report for The Wall Street Journal.
“On his social media, WeChat founder Allan Zhang posted photos from the landmark 2007 iPhone launch,” Jie and Dou report. “At the same time, WeChat parent company Tencent Holdings Ltd. rolled out a suite of web apps aimed at smartphone users, moving into turf long ruled by Apple and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, through its Android operating system.”
“Once a simple chat app, WeChat has become a digital Swiss Army Knife, allowing its 846 million users to read news, pay their bills, buy movie tickets and even do their banking,” Jie and Dou report. “The new apps function, which is available now, is called Mini Program. The apps are cloud-based, so users can access them without downloading and without taking up memory on a smartphone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is no threat to Apple nor is it anything new. Web apps have been around longer than the App Store itself.
Great advertising for WeChat. It is like Microsoft, in the way they report numbers. You might have 846 million ‘users’, but how many are actively doing all things?
I misread that at WetChat. lol
Typical MSN response. ‘Duh, we live in our own world of reality.”
Everything is a threat. If these apps work well, they’re a threat to every phone system. Web apps don’t need to be major. These are small, so it’s easier to get them to work well. And HTML 5 isn’t what it was 10 years ago either. The Chinese are very nationalistic. I can even see the Chinese government, at some time, requiring their use to damage foreign companies. It’s been happening for several years.