Why Chinese Apps Keep Topping US App Stores
People often ascribe TikTok's popularity to its algorithm, but this is only half the story. The other half might explain why Chinese apps keep topping US app stores, and why Chinese firms focus heavily on user experience and 'embroidery' to survive the competition.
Karen Hao 郝珂灵
ai, china tech & society @wsj. fellow @TAPP_Project. national magazine award winner. formerly @techreview @KSJatMIT. karen.hao@wsj.com. 🐘: @karenhao@mas.to
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People often ascribe TikTok's popularity to its algorithm. But this is only half the story.
— Karen Hao 郝珂灵 (@_KarenHao) March 27, 2023
The other half might just explain why Chinese apps keep topping US app stores—despite Washington's desperation to suppress them. w/ @shenlulushen & @raffaelehuang https://t.co/jD7IMJ3SqO -
We spoke to current and former employees at some of the most popular app developers as well as industry analysts. They all pointed us to the culture of the Chinese tech industry more so than any specific company's "secret sauce" technology.
— Karen Hao 郝珂灵 (@_KarenHao) March 27, 2023 -
To survive the cutthroat competition at home, Chinese firms focus heavily on user experience. They tweak and tune every little detail to make their apps that much more seamless and essential. The nonstop drive to get better even has a term in China’s tech industry: “embroidery.”
— Karen Hao 郝珂灵 (@_KarenHao) March 27, 2023 -
This is abetted by large pools of affordable engineering talent, which enables companies to engage in so-called "horse racing," a strategy ByteDance exploits aggressively: multiple teams will work on the same product or feature with slight variations. Only the best one is kept.
— Karen Hao 郝珂灵 (@_KarenHao) March 27, 2023 -
TikTok’s signature single column scroll was in fact a design it settled on through this strategy after creating several user interfaces, including a two-column version similar to Instagram’s explore tab.
— Karen Hao 郝珂灵 (@_KarenHao) March 27, 2023
Notice how many other companies like Instagram & Snap have since followed. -
It's hard to fathom a US company adopting this strategy. It's brutal to engineers. ByteDance workers have called it heartless because you never have full control.
— Karen Hao 郝珂灵 (@_KarenHao) March 27, 2023
But in the Chinese tech industry, it's more of a norm and helps companies move faster & make data-driven decisions.