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Cape Town – Developers had major challenges in today’s app store ecosystem, where their apps live one day to die another, according to an expert.
Ronald Bach, new business manager at WeChat Africa, explained that app developers for companies and brands sat with three major challenges in today’s app store ecosystem.
“Firstly, development of native apps across multiple platforms is costly and requires ongoing maintenance and support.
“Secondly, promoting your app to stand out from the rest and convincing a user to download it, is difficult and costly.
“Thirdly, if the company or brand has managed to get significant app downloads, most apps are only used for a short period of time and then usually forgotten about within a typical smartphones user’s collection of apps.”
He said WeChat official accounts addressed these challenges by offering a “build once–cross-platform” app solution with advanced APIs for location, media access and more.
How to build on WeChat
A Cape Town tech company offers an easy platform to manage that space and has positioned itself to become the most popular tool of its kind.
Swipe, a WeChat Africa integration partner based in Cape Town, said it aimed to make WeChatBuilder among the most popular tools on the platform outside its China power base – no small ambition for a business that only launched in April this year.
Within four months, former Media24 Touchlab heads Leo Redelinghuys and Deon Heunis have forged relationships with Supersport, Castle Lite, Kalahari.com, 2 Oceans Vibe and Soccer Laduma!
WeChat is considered the fastest growing social media platform of all time. “To put WeChat’s phenomenal growth into context, Twitter and Facebook required 1 400 and 1600 days respectively to reach the 100 million user milestone, while WeChat took a mere 433 days to achieve the feat,” Redelinghuys said. “There are 438 million monthly active users globally, the vast majority of whom are in China.”
Growth in Africa
“But WeChat is also experiencing incredible growth in other markets like Indonesia, India and Africa, and this was the ideal opportunity to create a multi-faceted tool that gives businesses and brands a stronger presence through an official account.”
WeChatBuilder has been fitted with an extensive library that includes menus, auto responders, user management, scheduled broadcasting, reporting, consuming RSS feeds, streaming music, polls, competitions and many more features while its WYSIWIG interface and image cropping functionality means that an official account can be up and running in as little as 30 minutes.
Redelinghuys said with the company's success in South Africa, they now have foreign markets firmly in their sights.
“We want to grow to India and Indonesia, the biggest WeChat markets outside of China. That is a challenge of course, but we have great belief in this product and think that reaching that goal is within our grasp.”
* Fin24 is part of Media24, a subsidiary of Naspers. Naspers has a 34% stake in Tencent. WeChat is owned by Tencent.
- Fin24.
Ronald Bach, new business manager at WeChat Africa, explained that app developers for companies and brands sat with three major challenges in today’s app store ecosystem.
“Firstly, development of native apps across multiple platforms is costly and requires ongoing maintenance and support.
“Secondly, promoting your app to stand out from the rest and convincing a user to download it, is difficult and costly.
“Thirdly, if the company or brand has managed to get significant app downloads, most apps are only used for a short period of time and then usually forgotten about within a typical smartphones user’s collection of apps.”
He said WeChat official accounts addressed these challenges by offering a “build once–cross-platform” app solution with advanced APIs for location, media access and more.
How to build on WeChat
A Cape Town tech company offers an easy platform to manage that space and has positioned itself to become the most popular tool of its kind.
Swipe, a WeChat Africa integration partner based in Cape Town, said it aimed to make WeChatBuilder among the most popular tools on the platform outside its China power base – no small ambition for a business that only launched in April this year.
Within four months, former Media24 Touchlab heads Leo Redelinghuys and Deon Heunis have forged relationships with Supersport, Castle Lite, Kalahari.com, 2 Oceans Vibe and Soccer Laduma!
WeChat is considered the fastest growing social media platform of all time. “To put WeChat’s phenomenal growth into context, Twitter and Facebook required 1 400 and 1600 days respectively to reach the 100 million user milestone, while WeChat took a mere 433 days to achieve the feat,” Redelinghuys said. “There are 438 million monthly active users globally, the vast majority of whom are in China.”
Growth in Africa
“But WeChat is also experiencing incredible growth in other markets like Indonesia, India and Africa, and this was the ideal opportunity to create a multi-faceted tool that gives businesses and brands a stronger presence through an official account.”
WeChatBuilder has been fitted with an extensive library that includes menus, auto responders, user management, scheduled broadcasting, reporting, consuming RSS feeds, streaming music, polls, competitions and many more features while its WYSIWIG interface and image cropping functionality means that an official account can be up and running in as little as 30 minutes.
Redelinghuys said with the company's success in South Africa, they now have foreign markets firmly in their sights.
“We want to grow to India and Indonesia, the biggest WeChat markets outside of China. That is a challenge of course, but we have great belief in this product and think that reaching that goal is within our grasp.”
* Fin24 is part of Media24, a subsidiary of Naspers. Naspers has a 34% stake in Tencent. WeChat is owned by Tencent.
- Fin24.
