WeChat Beats Google in Releasing Apps That Don't Need Downloading or Installing (mashable.com)

An anonymous reader shares a Mashable report: Click on a link in China's top messaging app, WeChat, and you'll be taken to a rich app-like experience, but without needing to download or install anything. Tencent, WeChat's maker, on Monday released "mini programs." The new mini programs work within the messaging app, and the early crop at launch include a Prisma-like photo editing app, a Pomodoro Timer productivity app, a flight search engine, and one for recipe searches. With the mini programs, the already-dominant WeChat continues its march to become practically ubiquitous on Chinese handsets, where people already use the messenger for real-life tasks like paying at restaurants, to hailing a Didi Chuxing ride. Last year, Google too announced that it would soon allow users to check out apps without downloading or installing them. The feature is yet to go live.

Comments

Congratulations - you invented the WWW

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> app...without needing to install anything

Congratulations - you invented the World Wide Web

Re:Congratulations - you invented the WWW

[cdrudge]

And you still have to download it. At least once. If not every time you use it.

Re:Congratulations - you invented the WWW

[jawtheshark]

... but you download stuff all the time on the world wide web.

Unless downloading means something else to marketing people than it means to me...

Re:Congratulations - you invented the WWW

[Junta]

Eh, we know what he meant, a modern web browser with javascript effectively being a runtime environment to produce applications that act pretty much exactly like a desktop application if desired. It's of course erroneous to say 'apps you don't download', since the apps are downloaded and cached, it just doesn't make a production out of it. Which is of course going to be the case for WeChat or Google or *anything* for that matter (after all a processor cannot run code that it can't read).

I know that if you described something like this to the original www team at the time they'd wonder at how their original vision of 'gopher++' turned into *this*.

Re:Congratulations - you invented the WWW

[David_Hart]

Congratulations - you invented the World Wide Web

There is probably a tiny bit more to it than that; nothing new in running against an application server, of course, but I suppose the real story might be that networking on mobiles is now considered mature and cheap enough for this architecture to be viable. And, I don't think you can equate www with "application servers".

My thought is that this is closer to how Citrix works. WeChat is basically the Citrix client...

Re:Congratulations - you invented the WWW

[Junta]

If I had to bet, I'd bet on browser embedded in the client rather than a remote video. You can do almost anything you could need in a mobile device using a web browser with javascript.

A remote video solution would be utterly terrible (it's not even seemless on local high speed networks, over mobile networks it's atrocious no matter who the vendor is).

Re:Congratulations - you invented the WWW

[thebes]

At least credit the source for your punchline:

https://xkcd.com/1367/

But will they beat them in withdrawing support?

[Chrisq]

But will they beat them in withdrawing support? Google are still the fastest at this.

Re:No need to download or install?

[unixisc]

No, it runs from the cloud