Comment by echevil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echevil | Hacker News Reader

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In China and other emerging markets, downloading apps from app store are just something that many users would rarely do, no matter it is App Store, Play Store, or many other Android App Stores available in China. It is a big obstacle that most US developers never realised.

The main benefit of super apps, and why it is so popular in those countries, is that it doesn't require users to download anything to use new feature. In some use cases I also found that so convenient.

Just as an example, WeChat has an ecosystem of mini-apps. When you go to a restaurant in China, you can often find QR code on each table. If you can that QR code, it would open a mini-apps that lets you place orders and make payments, without waiting for the waiter to serve you. A mini app is like a website that doesn't require download and storage on the phone, but the user experience feels more native and is tightly integrated with features available in WeChat. It would be much harder to get users if the same thing requires you download an app.

> In China and other emerging markets, downloading apps from app store are just something that many users would rarely do, no matter it is App Store, Play Store, or many other Android App Stores available in China. It is a big obstacle that most US developers never realised.

As someone who's never been to China and has never used a super-app: just curious, what are some of the obstacles faced installing a mobile app? Is it that most people don't trust un-curated apps?

On Android, there isn't one single authoritative app store (since the Play Store isn't available). Therefore every carrier, OEM, major app maker make their own app store (which behaves belligerently to their competitors). The users and app makers get caught in the middle of this messy fight. As a user, you might pick the 'wrong' app store. And developers will never have time to upload every update to 100 app stores, each of which may require slightly different metadata. So the stores clone each other's APK which lead to very slow and irreversible rollouts for devs. In a hyper competitive environment like China, not being able to control exactly when your binaries deploy is a huge, vital vulnerability so it has to be solved.

A super app that brings existing user bases solves both the deployment and discoverability problems.

In China (especially in tier 3,4 cities and rural places) and similar markets alike where many user have low digital literacy, installing apps from App Store is a skill that lots of users don't have. Their first few apps on their phone were most likely installed with someone else's help.

Actually learning every new app is an obstacle, but they managed to learn to a few apps like WeChat because it's super useful. They won't spend time to learn about something that won't bring immediate reward. Once they have a few apps installed on their phone, they'd feel that's enough.

Same thing in India too

Could you effectively replicate the restaurant example by having a qr code that leads to a website when scanned?

A nice, smooth, mobile-optimized website, I mean.

Possible, but I see two big obstacles: 1. Mini-apps are optimized for this one purpose and feels much faster and native, websites won't be able to achieve the same. 2. Some features provided by WeChat is actually important, especially the payment part. Websites won't be able to integrate something like WeChat pay seamlessly as mini-apps do. If it requires users to put in credit card information, it would instantly fail in these countries

I can't comment on 1 but for 2, I'm seeing a lot more merchants (probably Shopify merchants) support mobile payments on their websites (yes websites, not mobile apps) these days.

I can now go to a vendor's website (say jrwatkins.com, etc.) on my phone, checkout, do a fingerprint/face scan on Apple Pay and the transaction is done in under 5 seconds.

I assume the experience with Google Pay is similar.

There's no longer a need to create an account on the website. The delivery address defaults to the one on Apple Pay (and can be modified at time of payment). Delivery method can also be selected on the Apple Pay screen. My credit card number is never transmitted. This type of frictionless checkout that was once the domain of companies like Hoteltonight is now becoming more common on ecommerce sites.

I was also thinking about Apple Pay in my original comment. But that's iOS-only, and I'm going to hazard a guess that Google Pay doesn't work in China, so we're back to GP's point.

Right since the existing players are entrenched, but might work for other (emerging) countries?

We've never been big on mobile payments in the U.S. (because credit cards), but I'm finding myself using Apple Pay more and more. I read somewhere than ~50% of payments in the U.S. are now contactless.

I think it largely depends on how much Apple Pay / Google Pay could abandon their western centric design and invest heavily on localization. Payment solutions are just hard to unify - Lots of people in Indonesia don't have bank accounts, Bank transfer is actually a popular way of transaction in Brazil...

Apple Pay works in China, but basically nobody use it. It's designed with mindset that works in developed markets, and never worked out well in China.

Oh I can see that. When QR codes are so prevalent, the appeal of Apple Pay is probably not great.

I'm kind of thinking of markets outside China though.

Chinese companies are also thinking about that so it's matter of what works better in those markets

Yeah, if Apple Pay and Google Pay has the same market share then website could integrate those service and achieve the same, I agree. However, Apple Pay and Google Pay are also harder to use from the perspective of both consumers and merchants in these countries in the beginning, and IMO that's the reason they failed in the first place.

I don't know what payment methods these services require now, but in the beginning at least, they both supports just credit cards, which is basically suicidal. Most users won't be able to use it at all.

From merchants' perspective, they don't need to pay for transactions on WeChat Pay or AliPay, whereas both Apple Pay and credit card companies would charge them for usage. For this reason most small business wouldn't even think of using them.

Well, from what I'm seeing Apple Pay is gaining traction here in the U.S. Since the NFC part isn't proprietary, it works with almost any terminal (Ingenico, Verifone) that supports contactless payments (with few exceptions).

It supports Apple Cash, which in turn can funded via a bank debit card. (kind of like Venmo). There's no transaction fee with Apple Cash.

I believe there are currently no additional fees on the merchant side to accept Apple Pay [1], unless the customer uses a credit card via Apple Pay in which case the standard credit card fees apply.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204274

> Yeah, if Apple Pay and Google Pay has the same market share then website could integrate those service

According to the Apple developer docs[1], websites don't have to integrate with Apple Pay specifically; Safari also supports the (fairly new) platform-neutral Payment Request API[2]. Google's docs[3] suggest that something similar is available for Chrome on Android.

1. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w...

2. https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/

3. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/payments

The point is the QR based wechat payment is available for all kind of phones and it's available early than apple pay or google pay. Some merchant like a fruit stand can accept a QR payment, and I don't think they can afford a post machine.

Yes, with any kind of contactless payment, you need an NFC reader (which a smartphone kinda is), but it's much easier to print out a QR code.

yup, and we need to think about the timeline. At very early stage of this story, only limited phones support NFC, So wechat/alipay can quickly occupy the market with the QR base solution.

In India, it is quite similar and popular. However we can do that with a variety of apps. The amount will be deducted from account. It uses the unified payments interface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface) tech and Bharath QR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BharatQR)

On Android, there's Instant Apps[1] though for some reason Google hasn't integrated them on all devices. They work through links/QR codes and through NFC tags. I believe they might also be accessible though the Google Bluetooth Le beacon API (so when you enable the specific feature, you'll get a popup like "this location serves the following app" which you can then instantly launch).

I don't know about iOS but the two copy features from each other all the time so Apple probably has it too (if they weren't the first to launch them).

Honestly, if you're working from a QR code you might as well just serve a mobile web app. If you add PWA support your customers might even install it if they come around often.

[1]: https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7683278

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