Recently, there is a lot of news about Huawei's petal applications and services, not long ago petal search Petal Search in the domestic market for a short "appearance", which has attracted the attention of many technology digital enthusiasts, who have speculated about the market layout of petal applications.
Not long after the news of petal search was fermented, another petal application was about to debut. Recently, Huawei officially released the "Petal Application Market" crowd test project, although the application is the same as the Huawei application market, it belongs to the same app store app, but there are certain differences with the former in terms of product positioning and audience.
Petal App Market is an app that downloads, searches, manages, and discusses communities. And unlike previous petal applications, the petal application market directly said "support the smooth experience on third-party brand mobile phones" when describing the crowd test task. Judging from Huawei's previous layout of other petal applications, petal applications may not be limited to Huawei's hardware ecosystem, and moving towards a broader third-party mobile phone market may be its real purpose.
Targeting the third-party mobile app store market?
Before talking about the industry trend of the petal application market, we can first look at its specific experience, compared to other mobile phone app stores, what are its features and advantages to attract users to use.
First of all, on the software interface, the home page design of the petal application market is somewhat similar to Apple's App Store, which displays special recommended applications in a large banner, and the banner is for the developer to say and the software design features. The home page of other app stores is to directly display a large number of applications, compared with the home page interface of the petal application market is much cleaner.
In the software function part, in addition to the regular function, the petal application market has an independent community content section, just like the direct integration of tapTap part of the community communication function, so that users who love to study and share mobile applications have a space for quick sharing and discussion. Other mobile phones come with app stores that emphasize app downloads and recommendations, and do not focus on a separate section for the discussion community.
In addition, the author used the petal application market on a non-Huawei mobile phone and found that it does not support silent installation when downloading the application, that is, after the download is completed, you need to manually click to install it. If the number of downloaded apps is very tossed, this may also be a big disadvantage in the non-native app market, of course, this can be solved by some "adjustments", but it requires additional learning costs.
After comparing with Huawei's application market, it was found that the content ranking of the game "soaring list" in the petal application market was consistent with the former. However, it is worth noting that when searching for the keyword "Hongmeng", huawei application market will display harmonyOS software area, and petal application market will not, indicating that the two software share many data sources, but in the interface design, function and part of the content ecology to make a distinction, which may be to prepare the petal application market to go to a third party.
In fact, the third-party mobile phone application store market is an old development track, mainly popular in the initial stage of the development of domestic Android mobile phones. Mobile phone application store is different from other types of applications, has a strong exclusivity, since the major domestic mobile phone manufacturers began to pay attention to the construction of mobile phone application stores, pea pods, 91 assistant and PP assistant and other third-party application market gradually faded out of the mainstream mobile phone market, such as Cool An has been transformed from the application market into a digital community.
However, the old industry track does not mean that there is no room for development, and the application store experience of some niche brands and OEM mobile phones is not good, and some even directly pre-install third-party app stores, which is also an important reason why Tencent App Treasure and 360 Mobile Assistant can continue to exist. According to data from the Prospective Industry Research Institute, the scale of user spending in mainland app stores has maintained a growth trend from 2016 to 2020, reaching $51.9 billion in 2020, and Huawei, which has limited supply of mobile phone hardware, is also needing to expand its revenue sources.
The petal application market is only a small step for the petal application to move towards the third-party mobile phone market, and the imagination space brought by the formation of the entire petal system ecology is far more than this.
The domestic mobile phone market needs petal applications
The petal application market is only one of the petal applications, and the same application also includes petal mailbox, petal translation, petal map and petal clip, etc., which is a more complete set of mobile phone basic application system. Huawei's original intention of developing petal applications is related to the supply of Google GMS service (Google Mobile Services).
In 2019, the Google GMS service of Huawei mobile phones was cut off, which meant that Huawei mobile phones sold overseas could not normally use basic service applications such as Google Mail and Google Maps. In order to protect the overseas market as much as possible, Huawei launched its own HMS service (Huawei mobile service), and successively released petal series applications to replace Google's similar products, but with the arrival of a new wave of sanctions, the most fundamental chip foundry was blocked, Huawei mobile phones in the domestic and foreign markets are affected, and let the petal application return to the domestic market or can find new development space.
Personally, I think that the petal system application will be promoted in the form of a mobile phone basic service suite in the future, rather than just a single application. On the one hand, the experience of the whole set of petal applications is more perfect, and it can be pre-installed directly into other mobile phones to enhance the software experience limit of some mobile phones; on the other hand, the pre-installation of the entire set of petal applications is easier to form a basic application standard similar to Google's GMS service system, which is conducive to the construction of petal brand standards, and the domestic mobile phone market is also lacking a complete set of third-party basic application services.
In China, there are still a considerable number of smartphones that need a complete set of basic application services. Referring to the data of market research institutions such as IDC and Strategy Analytics, it can be seen that although the domestic smartphone market is seriously involved, the market share of "Other" in the third and fourth quarters of last year is still about 11%, and the sales volume in a single quarter can reach tens of millions of units, including a large number of aforementioned niche brands, white cards and cottage smartphones.
Not only that, some niche brands also need Huawei's brand fame for product promotion. On some e-commerce platforms, some niche brand mobile phones will type words such as "Huawei HMS" in the title bar, but there is no HMS service-related description in the product detail page, mainly to drain and increase user purchase rate. In fact, compared with mainstream brands, niche mobile phone brands do not have to worry about being dominated by petal services, and niche mobile phone brands need to rely on petal applications to consolidate the market, especially to stabilize the 100-yuan machine market in third- and fourth-tier cities and below, to avoid being impacted by mainstream mobile phone brands.
For Huawei's smart selection system products, it also needs a software system to promote the benign development of the entire ecosystem, so that partners can access the smart selection ecosystem at a lower cost. The emergence of the petal application system enables new third-party mobile phone products to have unified software basic service capabilities and more stable connection to other Huawei Smart Select devices.
In the author's opinion, Huawei has open sourced the Hongmeng system and donated OpenHarmony to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation. The emergence of petal applications is also to help the market promotion of Hongmeng, similar to the relationship between Android and Google GMS services, in the future, some capable manufacturers can develop their own customized systems and supporting software based on the Hongmeng open source project, and manufacturers in need can directly use petal applications, eliminating the trouble of redeveloping supporting software services.
End
The domestic mobile phone market in 2021 is extremely lively, and the major mainstream domestic mobile phone brands are impacting the high-end mobile phone market, and some manufacturers have released a number of new products a year to rush the high-end in order to improve the success rate, but the results have backfired. Losing the rapid growth of iPhone sales of major competitors, the data released by the Daily Economic News and the third-party data agency CINNO Research shows that the share of the iPhone in the domestic high-end mobile phone market in 2021 will reach a staggering 75%, where do domestic mobile phone brands lose?
In order to rush the high-end, domestic mobile phone manufacturers are frantically stacking materials at the hardware level, vowing to lead the iPhone by several gears in terms of taking pictures, but the problem that is easy to be ignored is that the "difference" in the system experience is also one of the important reasons why the iPhone can laugh to the end. Not only do consumers recognize the iPhone in the high-end machine market, in the mid-end price market, there are not many users who take limited funds to buy old models such as the iPhone 11, the main reason is that iOS is "not card".
In the past year, some domestic mobile phone manufacturers have gradually "moved the knife" to the bottom of Android, starting from the bottom of the system to improve the collaboration ability of mobile phone software and hardware. We are also happy to see more manufacturers to the bottom of the Android system to launch an impact, rather than staying in the optimization of shallow UI, as long as the accumulation of enough experience and master the ability to modify the bottom layer of the Android system, other domestic mobile phone manufacturers have the possibility of challenging Apple.