When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China
I think a great deal is being attributed to "leapfrogging" which should instead be attributed to idiosyncrasies in the Chinese market. Like that it's big, and that a great deal of software is bundled.For starters, surely there are other places around the world with nation-dominating highly-integrated platform apps. I mean, they name LINE and KakaoTalk. Is their point that China is 3x bigger than Japan and 10x bigger than Korea? Those factors are certainly accurate with respect to their national PPP (3.7x and 9.9x), and explains the data they observe really well. But Japan didn't have a leapfrogging experience, as they claim. Korea is a bit more complicated, but nonetheless, not cut-and-dried.Why WeChat in particular? The other apps compared—LINE and KakaoTalk—arguably became dominant in their countries the same way WeChat did: bundling. It just comes with your phone. By that logic, do we label the Apple App Store, bundled with every iPhone, a "service" that takes a 30% cut of many of the transactions that occur there? Again, the App Store absolutely fulfills all the roles described in the article, notwithstanding their particular points about UI.A16Z just isn't getting rich off Apple, so they're not going around hyping up an arguably the platform to end all platforms. Apple made $4.8 billion in iTunes and software on 1 billion iOS devices total by Q1 2015. It's not WeChat's estimated "$7 ARPU", but honestly, I bet Apple's is actually higher.