Mobile revolution in Vietnam | Hacker News Reader

Mobile revolution in Vietnam

wsj.com

26 pointshoare13 comments

I was in Vietnam in May for about a month, so some anecdotes:

I was amazed by the amount of iPhones there. It seemed to dominate in usage over Android. I was expecting to see a lot of 80 USD ShenZhen Androids, but no... either you have a dumb phone or an iPhone in Vietnam.

And iPhones are not just for the rich kids. People having about a dollar or two of disposable income per day are using (second hand?) iPhone 5+ models. No laptop, just a phone. I was traveling with my brother who still uses his iPhone 4 with iOS6 which was drawing some laughs :)

Social media wise: the people I interacted with all used Facebook a lot. Both Gmail and Yahoo for email. Twitter/Instagram, not so much. Snapchat was unheard of. I expected WhatsApp to be popular, but not so much.

Quite possibly a large number of the iPhones are stolen.

http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/science-it/102918/vietnam--...

Also, a interesting take on it is this - http://asiaplus.tumblr.com/post/105154935858/how-vietnamese-...

I suspect it is the fashion angle.

Supposedly people with little disposable income will use that on clothes, cars or anything else that others will see.

This in some reflexive attempt at giving themselves a measure of "class".

I wish i could relocate the source of the anecdote, as it was interesting not just in relation to fashion and copying but also in the social interactions.

Basically a young lady had landed a job, and went out shopping to celebrate her paycheck. She finds a market vendor with a display of handbags, and starts haggling.

This by demonstrating how much she knows about the brands "on display" by pointing out flaws in the copies being offered.

Then the vendor would excuse himself, bring another copy from the back room, and they would start over. This until the lady had gotten a bag of a level of quality she could afford.

Thing is, she knew it was a copy, she knew it would not last as long as the real deal, but she considered it a holdover until she had climbed the corporate ladder high enough to actually afford a real model.

In essence it came down to giving a social signal that she was a person that was "going places".

I live in Vietnam.

Facebook is extremely popular. Small businesses generally just create a facebook website instead of regular website. Zalo and Viber are also very popular.

Apple is an insanely popular brand - although not very many people have Macbooks. You see their logo plastered everywhere. The funniest place I've seen it is the cutout of the lamp shades in a local pizza restaurant.

I've been pretty amazed at how willing people are to spend essentially all their disposable income (and then some) on cell phones. New cell phones are more expensive here than in the US because they are taxed (although you don't get chained to an absurdly expensive plan with a company).

I think a big contributor to the popularity of smart phones is the camera. Every new location is a photo opportunity and every new photo must go up on Facebook.......

There are lots of stolen iphones. Ho Chi Minh has lots of thefts. Both locals and tourist get victimized.

The iPhone would be a great "single computer" for all of those people .. if only it were more open. I wonder if there are any Vietnamese hackers out there in some village, trying to work out how to write their own apps for the iPhone5 .. what a real pity that such devices, quite capable of supporting their own developer/user/owner, have been neutered of the task.

>I wonder if there are any Vietnamese hackers out there in some village, trying to work out how to write their own apps for the iPhone5 ..

After the success of Flappy Bird, written by a guy in Hanoi, I think a lot of them are at it.

Now that (as of last week) you can get a certificate to compile apps for your device from Xcode for free, it's totally possible. Someone would have to write an app that bundles an IDE, clang, codesign, etc. Fetching that certificate could be done directly by the app or through a proxy; this is the only sticky part, because I'm not sure whether Apple would approve an App Store app that uses undocumented web service or Xcode to do so, but the thing is, if Apple doesn't like it, there is now the "nuclear option" of staying off the App Store and having a web service that fetches said certificate, signs the IDE itself with it, and sends it to you. And it may not be necessary to go that far, perhaps depending on how much is being done on the client side versus the server.

If you add a Bluetooth keyboard and a TV, an iPhone starts to seem like a totally reasonable development platform...

Edit: By the way, if HTML dev (including local) suits one's needs, which for a beginning programmer it well might, that's been possible for a while. C.f. "Procoding".

There are some key enablers that they did right:

1. Internet connection (Landline and 3G) is so cheap relative to income. There is no locked in contract.

2. Free wifi everywhere and all businesses have free wifi (coffee shop, pho, book store,...)

3. Huge number of iPhone are used devices. They can get it for cheap because they are either stolen (in US) and hand carry to Vietnam.

4. Most people have family in US that would buy the phone for them or bring used ones back.

5. iPhone have very high resale value. So they use it for awhile and resell to get new ones. It's not that much of a big cost.

6. Smart phone in Vietnam is like car in US. You gotta have one or otherwise, you're considered poor!

The following is a lie (from the article):

>> A Vietnamese government agency forecasts the market for e-commerce will generate revenue of $4 billion this year compared with $700 million in 2012.

There are high percentage of mobile users but they don't spend a lot. As a matter of fact, most ecommerce revenue are cannibalizing from people who would buy these things by driving a bike to the store anyways. Most shops do offer delivery for free or small fee. Reason: it's like 2-3 miles trip max. Everything is super close together.

Disclaimer: I am Vietnamese, spent most my life in Vietnam, tried to do startup in Vietnam, failed to compete with Facebook when it started with only 1M users in Vietnam.

"Internet penetration has grown to 44% of the communist state’s 90 million people from 12% a decade ago. Much of that is driven by smartphones, which are used by more than a third of the population"

Basically, like cell phones brought voice to many who could skip landlines, and the associated expensive infrastructure, smart Internet phones are bring the web to people. Local businesses are taking advantage of this.

I spent 2 months in Vietnam (HCMC) last Nov-Dec, and that was the first thing that surprised me. Not the iPhone5s but everyone seemed to have an iPhone6, and yep I couldn't figure out the economics, but that's the reality (thanks to posts below the economics now make sense).

> Men read news from a smartphone in downtown Hanoi, Vietnam, on Dec. 5. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

TIL: Vietnamese have amazing eyesight

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