Wandoujia

» see wandoujia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Wandoujia means pea pod. It began as a Windows program you installed to manage an Android phone over a USB cable, back when that was something people genuinely needed: push apps onto the device, move music across, load wallpapers, pull video down before you left the house. The phone-side app store came later and became the business everyone remembers.

Wang Junyu had been on Google's user experience team in Beijing and was twenty five when he left to build it. The project started inside Kai-Fu Lee's Innovation Works as that incubator's first, and the company behind it was registered in Beijing in September 2010. Downloads hit twenty five million within two years. Four funding rounds followed, with SoftBank and Goldman Sachs among the investors, and by 2013 the valuation was past a billion dollars with around four hundred people on the payroll.

Its position in the market was precise and uncomfortable. Wandoujia was the biggest app store in China with no handset brand and no internet giant behind it, running at roughly six percent share and seventh place by 2015. In July 2013 Baidu agreed to pay $1.9 billion for the rival 91 Wireless, which is what the same asset was worth with a parent attached.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a pea pod was for ~

The reason a company like this could exist at all is that Google Play does not operate in mainland China. Take the default store out of Android and the app layer becomes an open market, which is why China ended up with dozens of competing stores and an entire software category, the PC-side phone assistant, that most of the world never had a reason to invent. Turkey had Play. The question Wandoujia existed to answer was one I never had to ask.

The PC client was also the part that aged fastest. It assumed a household computer more capable than the phone, and a person willing to sit down and decide in advance what would be on the device when they walked out the door. Both assumptions expired somewhere between 2013 and 2016, as data got cheap and phones got fast enough to do their own downloading.

~ a billion, then two hundred million ~

Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo all shipped their own stores preinstalled, and a preinstalled store beats a downloaded one without ever having to be better at anything. Tencent and Qihoo 360 both ran stores with a distribution channel already behind them, the sort of channel Wandoujia had to go out and buy. Independence was the thing that made the company interesting and it was also the reason it had no free traffic anywhere.

Alibaba announced the acquisition in July 2016 at around $200 million and folded the distribution business into its mobile business group, with the customary promise that it would keep operating independently. Most of the original team left soon after. Wang went off to build Qingmang, a reading app constructed on a refusal of algorithmic feeds.

~ the last install ~

On 20 February 2020 Wandoujia announced that the PC version would stop serving on the 28th, citing business adjustment. Local management functions kept working inside whatever copy you already had on disk, which is the software version of leaving the lights on in an empty building. Ten years after the pea pod shipped, the original product went dark, and the app store half of it had long since been absorbed into somebody else's org chart.

Today wandoujia.com serves an English-language page about photo sharing and digital photo albums, keyword stuffed and connected to nothing the company ever did. The domain was worth more to a stranger than the name was to Alibaba.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »