Background

During the summer of 2015, many of the start up companies I worked for in China were finding the majority of their users were no longer using desktop computers, notepads or laptops to view their websites. Image sizes and lack of cloud storage were causing latency issues in a country where the number of potential customers is over 600 million, more than twice the size of the United States population.

Focusing on mobile-friendly web applications was not a simple solution, either. Unlike the global counterparts, our private studies showed that Chinese smartphone users were less likely to use their smartphone browser, and more likely to interact with applications that were downloaded directly from the application store on their smartphone.

In order to engage users following this trend, several small applications were developed in order to provide an application that could be downloaded easily from the App Store for the iPhone.

Summary

While working as a consultant for those same Chinese brands, we noticed another disrupting shift in personal trends. Those same users—who preferred downloading a company's application rather than visiting their website in a smartphone browser—now were visiting a brand's content by utilizing either WeChat applications.

WeChat development has slowed down my Swift development for Chinese brands. My Swift development is now catered towards gaming applications for children in both the iOS and Google Play ecosystems.