Why China’s favorite news app lets users order food
ByteDance’s Jinri Toutiao is becoming one of China’s many super apps, which include WeChat and Meituan
If you’re a typical smartphone user in a Western country, you probably have a different app for everything. A couple of reading apps for news and ebooks, a few social apps, one app to book tickets for trains and planes, a ride-hailing app, maybe a food delivery app and perhaps a handful of other apps for fun and recreation.
But in China, many smartphone users prefer to turn to a single super app that fuses together entirely separate functions. So it’s not completely surprising that China’s favourite news app is now adding features that have nothing to do with news, like food delivery.
Jinri Toutiao (Daily Headlines), created by TikTok owner ByteDance, used to be a platform that only offered precisely what its name suggests: A curated news feed, churned out by algorithms that know what you like. An update this week, however, added many more functions to its already crowded content channels.
Breaking down China's most popular news app, Toutiao
Users can now use third-party services to order deliveries from restaurants, grocery stores and pharmacies or browse the latest job listings from within the app ostensibly meant for news consumption.
Also added are buttons for the Keen fitness app and Himalaya, the country's popular music and podcast platform. There’s even a platform that lets you rent consumer electronics like VR glasses or printers.
Toutiao has effectively reinvented itself, transforming into an app that users never need to leave. It’s joining a slew of competing apps that have all taken the same approach.