Business and Money Tips

From South China Morning Post Jan 2018 Tencent Holdings, China’s biggest internet company by market value, is on a collision course with Apple and Alphabet with its aggressive push into mini mobile applications, which allow users to bypass traditional app stores and run programs directly within its WeChat application. Tencent has re-engineered the WeChat messaging app in a way that applications smaller than 10 megabytes can run instantly on WeChat’s interface. It is now offering 580,000 mini programs after just one year of development, compared to the 500,000 mobile apps that Apple’s App Store published from 2008 to 2012, according to Hu Renjie, WeChat’s mini program director. “The mini program is a brand new product model which can seamlessly link the offline and the online together,” said Hu, adding that the mini program scheme has attracted 1 million developers. As well as bypassing the need for app stores, mini programs offer speed of access to users because they can be lo