Ben Gilbert: recommendation

Transcript context

…It's totally brilliant from a technical and computer science standpoint. This completely obviates the need to develop and maintain rich apps across iOS, Android, and all of the various other operating ecosystems within China and various flavors of China-only Android, Xiaomi, and the like. I don't think it totally obviates it. I think you do need to build special versions for each operating system, even if you're building a Mini Program, or at least hook into the native stuff on its own. What it did do is make the operating system less important. The switching cost goes away, or you can switch between iPhone and Android more easily because you've got WeChat and all Mini Programs no matter what hardware is. Yup. Totally. Most of these companies, once they reach any scale, they do have native apps and WeChat Mini Programs. But in terms of customer acquisition, loyalty across platforms—it's huge. We'll try and link to this in the show notes as well. There's this amazing graph of looking at PDD and its competitors of how many users they have in their own app ecosystem versus in the WeChat Mini Program app ecosystem. PDD is the only one. They have 233 million users that interact primarily through the WeChat Mini Program, which is a fully-featured Pinduoduo app. All the same features are in there as in the native app.…

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