11/6/2023 0 Comments Wechat mini program magento![]() ![]() Truth be told, I simply did not wish to share too much when I had too little control. So when Mei first asked me to try hers, I told her that my WeChat wasn’t up-to-date, and she graciously took my order with a pen and pad. Researchers found last year that less than 40% of all mini-programs laid out their privacy terms some even continued to track users’ location after permission had been revoked. At the same time, it is often impossible to find any of the developers’ information.Īnd once you opt in, there is no clear way to opt out. To use a mini-program in WeChat, one has to authorize it to obtain their “public profile,” which can include an alias, bio picture, and location. The price of convenience involved disclosing more personal data than I was comfortable with. WeChat dominatesf the market with more than 400 million daily active users.ĭespite their rising popularity, though, I had mostly skirted around them. By the end of last year, the number of mini-programs had surpassed 6 million in total. Since Tencent officially rolled them out in January 2017, other tech giants, including Alipay, Baidu, and ByteDance, have followed suit. In many ways, the rise of mini-programs is made possible by the landscape of China’s platform industry, which is dominated by super apps, like WeChat and Alipay. There is no equivalent in other countries. ![]() And when transactions are finished, users simply close the pop-up window and return to WeChat’s main menu. Instead, they can scan a QR code or do a quick search in WeChat to locate a program. And customers don’t have to overload their phones with apps they rarely use. Merchants don’t have to worry about maintaining separate apps for iOS and Android users. A mini-program is lighter than a native app and easier to develop because it is housed by bigger platforms. They wanted to build a decentralized platform, allowing third-party developers to help small businesses handle daily transactions. WeChat founder Allen Zhang and his team began testing out mini-programs in 2016. Mini-programs landing page on WeChat, which contains the author’s recently used programs. Mini-programs were designed to help people like Mei, and now, she and her business are being lumped into the bigger picture of government-mandated data gathering during the pandemic. So I figured it was worth it,” she told me. “It was the going rate for a waiter’s monthly salary. She had paid an initial fee of just over $500, plus a small maintenance fee to the developers every month. It had no delivery option or built-in function to display promotional deals. Unlike some of the programs offered by larger restaurants, hers was bare-bones. A few months earlier, she hired a company to develop a mini-program to handle dining-in orders. In November that year, I visited Mei’s dumpling shop and noticed QR codes taped to the corners of every table. And neighborhood shops quickly joined in. Luxury brands like Dior and Prada prompted their customers to make reservations. Staff at McDonald’s in Beijing routinely directed customers to use the program to place orders. I began noticing them in late 2017, when they popped up in malls and restaurant chains. In short, a mini-program is an “app within an app.” It allows people to access extra functionality without leaving the host application. ![]() The ubiquity of mini-programs predated the pandemic. Before visiting public places, like a park, a shopping mall, or a train station, one is expected to take out a smartphone and scan codes displayed beside the entryway. To register, users are usually required to complete a facial scan, then enter their name, mobile number, and national ID. Shortly after the Covid-19 outbreak, local governments in China quickly rolled out contact-tracing tools, many of which rely on mini-programs hosted on WeChat and Alipay. The other was labeled as my “Travel History Card,” which tracked the provinces and cities I visited in the past two weeks, based on my cell phone location. The one on the left read: “Beijing Health Kit.” Scanning it in my WeChat, I was taken to a mini-program, a pop-up window that contained my photo and health status. Next to the sensor, two QR codes were taped to the front door. Last year, as Beijing successfully put the pandemic under control and restaurants began to reopen, the city government issued strict guidelines, including mandated body temperature checks as well as contact-tracing mechanisms. When I came to the shop in early August, Mei, the shop owner, was standing at the door, fiddling with a broken temperature sensor. A short walk from my home in Beijing is a dumpling shop where I stop by every time I crave a hearty bowl of tomato soup, and the dumplings the shop is known for. ![]()
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