How to develop a mobile App quickly? Ant Financial mobile development platform mPaaS to help you

Back a couple of years ago, you might have been surprised to use Alipay to take buses and subways. But now, an outsider visiting cities like Shanghai and Hangzhou no longer has to waste time standing in long lines at subway ticket sales. Whether it’s checking into a station with Alipay or opening an App like Shanghai METRO’s METRO Metropolis, these apps ultimately appear and exist to facilitate consumers’ daily travel experience.

At the same time, today’s young people may be increasingly unfamiliar with the services of banks’ offline branches and artificial counters, as more and more transfers, remittances and other transactions take place online. The scene of queuing up for train tickets at train stations early in the morning during the Spring Festival travel rush years ago has also gradually disappeared. People have become accustomed to using the Internet to do everything and become accustomed to it.

But it didn’t happen overnight, and the days when we joked about the poor experience of some apps and online businesses don’t seem too far away. The friction and integration of these experiences can be said to be an epitome and pain of the digital transformation of all walks of life. Perhaps many years from now, people will look back at 2017 and see this as a point in time. In this year, both traditional financial institutions and non-financial industries have made great efforts to develop or innovate their own apps in order to better adapt to the needs of users in the Internet era and improve user experience. These conditions will soon be changed, and behind these changes is the protagonist of today’s story — Ant Financial mobile development platform mPaaS.

The birth and growth of mPaaS

MPaaS is short for Mobile Platform-as-A-Service. If you are familiar with cloud computing, you will be familiar with the concept of PaaS. If you use PaaS’s services, it means you don’t need to buy a server or install your own server software, and you can use the middleware platform to customize and develop your own applications.

The concept of mPaaS was created by Ant Financial. It derives the concept of mobile platform on the basis of PaaS, where M stands for mobile. Analogous to the concept of PaaS, mPaaS focuses more on mobile r&d platform services. Developers can use mPaaS, ant Financial’s mobile development platform, to develop, manage and release mobile apps, as well as manage the whole life cycle of the App, including RESEARCH and development testing, packaging and construction, release management, user behavior analysis and flash back analysis after release, etc. If PaaS platform is to manage the life cycle of enterprise background services, including the process of research and development, release and monitoring, then mPaaS is to manage the whole life cycle of mobile App.

In fact, when the traditional financial industry turns its attention to mobile App development, there is a seemingly smooth but potholed road ahead. As early as 2013, Alipay started this journey and gradually explored a clear way to open up based on mPaaS platform. This is just like when you start to prepare for learning this course, the outstanding student Alipay has already finished learning several years ago and summarized a set of learning methods and fast learning platform for you. It can be said that all the technical services and components of mPaaS are derived from Alipay, and have undergone numerous tests under extreme conditions such as various high concurrency of Alipay and in actual business scenarios.

To give you a better understanding of the advantages of mPaaS, let’s start with the development process of Alipay, a national App. Since 2013, Alipay has started its All In wireless strategy. Before that, Alipay was still a single application payment tool, with only some very basic modules and tool libraries. In 2013, with the rapid development of Alipay’s All In wireless strategy, the functions and applications provided by Alipay App also began to develop In a blowout manner. At the same time, the number of alipay APP users also began to grow exponentially, and the development team supported by the alipay APP became increasingly large. How can such a large development team collaborate effectively? This puts forward high requirements for the rationality of alipay App development architecture design.

From 2013 to 2015, Ant Financial made an architecture governance for Alipay, and the development architecture of the entire Alipay App was layered. Alipay App was transformed into a platform-based App, which integrated various applications and realized the service and modularization of applications, and the development tool became componentized. In this way, each application based on Alipay App can be independently developed by a team, while the whole Alipay is managed by a common underlying platform framework. In this way, Alipay App allows Alipay to rapidly expand its business from the perspective of architecture. Every new business is equivalent to developing a new module, and the new module only needs to be inserted into this framework to run.

During this period, the Alipay development team also developed many common capabilities of module development, including things like message push, analytics, gateways, and so on. These common capabilities are required by applications in almost all business scenarios. Another simple idea along with the general technical capabilities is: can we better export the experience and capabilities accumulated on the Alipay architecture to serve more financial institutions?

On September 14, 2015, Ant Financial announced the launch of the “Internet Thruster” program, which will help more than 1,000 financial institutions transform and upgrade to new finance within five years. Ant Financial, as an “Internet booster”, will promote the full opening of platform, data and technology capabilities. In October, mPaaS version 1.0 was released.

MPaaS in the 1.0 era had relatively simple functions, including three core functions: gateway; User behavior analysis; Message push. In this period, mPaaS service network business bank and Tianhong fund two major customers.

Soon by the end of 2016, mPaaS 2.0 was in the works. The most important feature of mPaaS 2.0 is the move towards sharing and the separation of frameworks and modules, meaning that functionality provided on mPaaS can be exported separately, which means that customers can, for example, use a single feature (such as notification push) without using any other services at all. The shared mode can also be described as multi-tenant mode, which means that developers can have more than one mPaaS on the public cloud, and different users can use the same mPaaS through logical isolation, which can effectively reduce the use cost on the public cloud.

In addition, mPaaS in 2.0 period have more diversified functions: one is MDS function, namely publishing function, which can remind users to download and upgrade the new version in APP; The other is a hotfix, which is released to the client via MDS, and in case of emergency, if there is a problem with the code, the developer can fix the problem at run time without releasing a new version.

Hotfix was an immediate hit with the market, where it was hard to find the same service before or since. In January 2017, mPaaS 2.0 appeared on the scene. This time, it has further expanded its customer service. In addition to financial customers such as Suning Financial, more non-financial customers have joined in, including Ali Health, OFO, and Shanghai Metro as we mentioned above.

In May 2017, Ant Financial’s mPaaS technical team began to enter Shanghai METRO. By October, The App “METRO Metropolis” of Shanghai METRO was officially launched, and the number of registered users of the App exceeded one million within a week of its launch, which was supported by only a dozen development teams. Shanghai METRO’s “METRO Metropolis” App has added the function of scanning to check into stations, which means that Shanghai users no longer have to wait in line for half an hour to buy subway tickets during rush hours.

During the launch of the “METRO Metropolis” App, the new “hotfix” feature of mPaaS 2.0 went through a life-or-death test. In order to do a good job in the data operation and monitoring work of the App, the ability of mPaaS was used in the development of the App, and a comprehensive monitoring of buried points was done before the App went online. Relevant personnel could pay close attention to the use of users, so that any problems could be found and repaired in the first time. Sure enough, in the first week of the App’s launch, the tech guy was keenly aware that some models could not complete user registration smoothly. Within a day of finding the problem, the technical guy quickly solved the problem, and made use of the hot repair function to quickly repair, to ensure that the user experience is not damaged to the greatest extent. Imagine waiting for a new version to be released on every mobile app market without a hotfix. It would take an incalculable amount of time to approve and launch, and ultimately affect an incalculable number of users.

Subway, Chunyun, banking — mPaaS accept the challenge and complete the transformation to the peerless master

From October 2017, mPaaS began to transform to 3.0 stage. MPaaS 3.0 began to support private clouds and introduced data synchronization services. Data synchronization is a service that keeps mPaaS constantly connected to clients. This service ensures that some critical information can be reached by all online users in seconds, improving timeliness and stability.

At the same time, the functionality of mPaaS applets has been removed in version 3.0, making it a purely technical solution, which means that mPaaS developers can use applets technology to develop applets for their apps. Taking Shanghai Metro as an example, the App supports other developers, ISVs or merchants to develop more mini programs around Shanghai Metro, and these mini programs can run in Both Shanghai Metro and Alipay, bringing more traffic and benefits to developers.

At the end of September 2017, during the transition to 3.0, mPaaS started working with 12306. At that time, the mPaaS development team did not know that in just three months, they would come up with a new product, namely the deployment and development of a new 12306 App to deal with a huge problem — the Spring Festival travel rush.

But Spring Festival travel as a long-standing problem, according to the mPaaS development team said: “is not a joke”. As a matter of fact, the normal development cycle for such a big product as 12306 App is more than one year, and the mPaaS technical team is faced with the situation of entering the market at the end of September and the Spring Festival transportation in December. Such a high intensity and such difficult technical challenges are unprecedented at home and abroad.

However, the mPaaS team finally accepted the task. The team of more than 10 people and the team sent by the Ministry of Railways worked overtime, and finally went online on January 3rd after passing various rounds of tests and pressure tests. In the end, 12306’s online App successfully supported the Spring Festival travel rush, and made a contribution to the smooth return home for Chinese New Year.

In addition, from 2.0 to 3.0, mPaaS helped Bank of Suzhou successfully complete the deployment of cloud, providing strong support for the diversification of direct banking scenarios; Helped GUANGDONG Development Bank improve APP performance through mPaaS offline package, reducing the startup time of “discover wonderful” by nearly 70%; India’s Paytm uses this capability of mPaaS to better monitor and count data inside the incoming App, so as to better optimize user experience…

At this point, mPaaS has also completed its transformation. In terms of the solution of a single problem in the field of App development, there may be some competitors that can barely compete with mPaaS, but in terms of an overall solution of the mobile dimension of client App, there is no rival in the financial industry that can match mPaaS. While mPaaS is precipitated based on alipay’s ability, which makes it more suitable for the high concurrent demand of travel class. Or the strong disaster resilience and security required by the financial industry.

Take responsibility to meet the new challenges of mPaaS 3.0

Looking back at the growth and transformation of mPaaS, we can see that mPaaS has mastered the following key skills relying on Alipay:

1. Grow into a master of 2C end product operation based on the accumulated business scenarios of Alipay’s long-term development.

Many traditional financial and non-financial institutions may not know how to make a successful consumer oriented (TO C) product, and even lack experience in business operation and marketing. For traditional industries, no matter the transportation industry or the financial institutions such as banks, due to lack of relevant background, even if they outsource their business, when it comes to such a large scene as digital transformation that requires a systematic plan, the outsourcing companies are often unable to provide a complete plan, so that the traditional industries continue to face difficulties.

MPaaS because pay treasure this through long-term technology accumulation, strength is abundant, has a history, technology stand up to the most extreme challenges, and gradually grow up to be able to provide proactive solutions to potential in the future, it can give the traditional industries with periodic digital solution of a complete set of the complete life. And this forms the generation difference between mPaaS and other similar products.

2. Support team collaborative development from the perspective of development framework, which is more efficient.

Reviewing the birth history of mPaaS, it was created to serve the collaboration of various teams at the very beginning, so as to better support the rapid expansion of business and team collaboration. In addition, mPaaS provide many ready-made development components and templates without having to reinvent the wheel, further improving the efficiency of App development. This point in 12306’s 3 months of rapid development cases is a good example.

3. Powerful App performance optimization ability to ensure user experience.

As for the exploration of “how to realize the second opening of App and shorten the waiting time of users”, the technical team of Alipay has studied far beyond your imagination. Now, with the help of THE mPaaS platform, Alipay is contributing this technology to you, so that developers can also develop their own high-performance applications. At present, the opening time of banking apps optimized by mPaaS has changed from ten seconds to seconds, which is closely related to the technical experience behind it.

4. From small programs to face recognition technology, Alipay’s innovative technology supports

Currently, the mPaaS team is constantly opening up more features to the outside world. From the face recognition technology necessary for almost every financial App, to the small program technology that can better build its own ecology. These cutting-edge technology hotspots you can imagine are gradually realized on mPaaS, and the blockchain technology based on ant BASIC technology strategy in the future is worth looking forward to.

5. It is not only the output of technology, but also the output of experience. Promoting advanced experience will fundamentally change the way of research and development

MPaaS offline package, hot repair, App grayscale release, small programs can fundamentally change the way of research and development, release, improve efficiency. For example, the offline package completely solves H5 loading performance problems and network dependence, allowing developers to focus more on business logic and less on performance. The following is the highly recognized experience of grayscale publishing by front-line operation and maintenance engineers during the grayscale launching process of a bank App, which is also the original intention of mPaaS external services.

The end of the

A year ago, McKinsey, a world-renowned management consulting firm, released a report saying that in the Internet era, as China’s economic growth has entered a new normal, the operating environment for traditional banks has become increasingly severe, and a large number of fintech companies are threatening the core business of traditional banks in various segments. Traditional banks are facing unprecedented opportunities and challenges, and digital transformation is imminent. So in this context, how do organizations do their own digital transformation? How to start the development of mobile App, the stepping stone of digital transformation? Ant Financial’S mPaaS has given its answer.

On September 19, 2018, the annual Ant Financial ATEC Technology Exploration Conference will be held again in The Cloud Town as part of the Cloud Conference. The new generation of enterprise financial intelligent mPaaS platform 4.0 will be withdrawn in this conference, please look forward to ~! Continue to follow the official wechat account of ant Financial Technology to learn more first-hand information!

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