Liaotianbao, formerly known as Bullet Message, once a fast-rising app that some people saw as a potential challenger to China’s dominant messaging app WeChat, dismissed 200 employees on March 5, according to a local media report.
Chinese smartphone maker Smartisan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Smartisan officially launched the app in August 2018 and is an investor in Kuairu Technology, the Beijing-based firm which originally developed Bullet Message.
Once seen as an aggressive new player in China’s social media market, Liaotianbao faced a “David and Goliath” style battle with Tencent Holdings’ WeChat, which has become China’s ubiquitous do-it-all app with more than 1 billion users worldwide.
While the app enjoyed a meteoric rise in its early days, Liaotianbao has struggled to keep users on its platform. Less than 14% of Liaotianbao’s users remained on the app a week after they downloaded it, according to a January report by Chinese data provider Getui.
In its first week following an August 20 launch, Bullet Message shot up Apple’s app store charts in China, and ranked as the top downloaded free app on App Annie for a time.
“It was heavily weighted towards Smartisan users and was never a serious threat,” said Matthew Brennan at China Channel, a Shenzhen-based marketing agency. Allen Zhang [WeChat’s head] claimed he didn't even bother to download it. I think that's probably true.”
WeChat started out as a simple messaging service in China, but it has since morphed into a broad platform that includes mobile payments, games, services and mini-programs that enable users to access services such as food delivery and ride-hailing without having to download additional apps.
Liaotianbao differentiated itself from WeChat with convenient features such as automatic transcription of voice messages to text with iFlytek’s voice recognition technology. WeChat users have to select a voice message manually for transcription.
Bullet Message instantly became an investor darling. A week into the launch Kuairu Technology raised 150mil yuan (RM91.49mil) in Series A funding from Gaorong Capital, Chengwei Capital and Smartisan.
Yet the app was criticised by some users for lax restrictions on the type of content that was hosted on its news feeds.
Liaotianbao was summoned by China’s cyber watchdog, along with other several other new social media apps, to conduct security checks of content, according to a statement on the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission’s website in February.
Uninstalling WeChat was “not realistic”, Smartisan’s chief executive Luo Yonghao admitted last year, but he also said in September that the app would spend 1bil yuan (RM609.88mil) over six months to try and acquire 100 million users.
The app was relaunched as Liaotianbao in January, and offered cash incentives to users to read certain news articles, invite new friends or shop on the app. However, the app was blocked from opening within WeChat’s browser for containing unsafe content and receiving user complaints. – South China Morning Post
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