Thousands of people<\/span> gathered Wednesday night in a southern Chinese city to hear Zhang Xiaolong, Tencent\u2019s low-key executive who built WeChat eight years ago. It\u2019s no longer adequate to call the app a messenger, for it now enables myriad functions that infiltrate Chinese people\u2019s private and public lives.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just the tech circles tuning into the event. Civil servants, real-estate agents, salon owners, fruit vendors, teachers, artists \u2014 anyone who uses WeChat <\/a> to facilitate daily work watched attentively for news and tips that came out of the annual conference.<\/p>\n Zhang, nickname Allen, is by nature a hardcore product manager. He went to great lengths during his four-hour speech, telling people productivity is WeChat\u2019s holy grail, and that he wants to make user sessions \u201cshort and efficient.\u201d He called out apps obsessed with keeping users on, which many may agree include ByteDance\u2019s video app TikTok<\/a> and news aggregator Jinri Toutiao.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a tough sell, though, for WeChat is anything but a disposable tool. The app now boasts more than 1 billion daily users; 750 million of them open WeChat Moments, a scrolling feed of friends\u2019 updates, each day, during which they check it more than 10 times. User growth is cooling, but that\u2019s expected, given the super app\u2019s enormous base. In addition to being a social network, the juggernaut has also devised a host of new features that may generate more eyeball time \u2014 and help it maintain meaningful growth.<\/span><\/p>\n Two years ago, WeChat made a move that would speed up its evolution from a simple app into an all-in-one platform. It rolled out so-called mini programs, which are stripped-down versions of native apps with only core features in exchange for smaller size and quicker access. To date, there are more than 1 million such lite apps<\/a> and 200 million people access them every day, an achievement that inspired other tech giants to follow suit.<\/a><\/p>\n Zhang said from the outset that mini apps weren\u2019t meant to replace regular apps, for the latter provide a more complete user journey. In effect, mini apps are getting more powerful as they further integrate with chats and gain new capabilities, such as an upcoming Siri-like voice assistant. <\/a>Mini programs are also making inroads into the offline world, facilitating transactions like scan-to-pay at subway turnstiles, all without the fuss of app downloads.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no mini-program \u201cstore\u201d at the moment, but a less conspicuous infrastructure is taking shape. Users can already look up mini apps on WeChat\u2019s internal search engine and may soon be able to rate them, according to Zhang. WeChat will in turn factor those reviews into search results, akin to how the App Store works.<\/p>\nAn app universe<\/h3>\n
The public space<\/h3>\n