Wandoujia doesn’t even call itself an app store anymore. Founder Wang Junyu and his staff now refer their company as a “mobile content search engine,” of which the app store is just a piece of something greater. That said, it’s second only to the Qihoo’s (NYSE:QIHU) app store in terms of monthly active users and number of Android apps.
“Everyone is trying to do a mobile search engine, but we think the problems they are trying to solve are wrong, because we believe that users’ most important needs in mobile are the content itself,” says Wang.
The company reports 300 million installs for its Chinese software, which includes both an Andoroid and Windows desktop client. Last summer, Wang, a 27-year-old former employee of Google, told us the store was seeinghalf a millionnewusersaday; that’s about half of China’s daily Android activations. Wang wouldn’t disclose active user numbers or any stats for the international version,SnapPea, but says it’s popularity is growing rapidly. The company just received US$ 120 million in funding led by Japan’s SoftBank.
“We won’t expand our product lines dramatically,” Wang says. “We want to invest that money into our core product offerings.”
So how did Wandoujia, once just one of more than 200 Chinese Android app stores, become one of the most trusted and well-known names in China’s mobile space today? Wandoujia actually started out as a syncing tool between PC and Android. Targeting geeks, it took a Silicon Valley approach with its app store, which also aggregated search results from all the other Chinese app stores. It’s clean, uncluttered interface was a far cry from the existing stores, as were the labels on each app that indicates if it is paid or contains advertisements. Furthermore, Wandoujia has licensed with Tencent's and Qihoo’s antivirus software to scan every app for viruses.
From SnapPea to snappy
For the last four years, the company has continued to add more functions and features. Wandoujia expanded the scope of its search results to e-books, video, music, wallpapers, themes, and games – all optimized for mobile, and with more than one million results in each vertical. New features are often first tested out on SnapPea, Wandoujia’s English-language international app. Wang says the US is one or two years ahead of China in this space, so SnapPea often serves as a sort of testing ground for what will eventually catch on in China.
“In the long term, all users’ needs are the same, but in the short term, the technical infrastructure, the ecosystems are pretty different between different countries,” he says.
For example, SnapPea has a lightweight browser-based client. In its latest update, a flashy new feature called “Photosnap” was added, in which photos taken on the phone are instantly uploaded and shareable from within the browser. And “instant” truly means “instant.” No need to even refresh the page; each photo appears on screen just seconds after taking it.
Source: TECHINASIA
