MPaaS is a mobile development platform derived from Alipay, providing cloud-to-end one-stop solutions for mobile development, testing, operation and maintenance. The product capability covers “cross-end development framework, R&D collaboration, digital operation, intelligent marketing, back-end connection” and other scenarios. At present, it has served many B-end clients such as 12306, Shanghai Metro, Guangfa Bank, Huaxia Bank, CSDN, Coca Cola, and hundreds of c-end users.

The state of mobile Development

Native application development mode provides standardized implementation and optimization schemes for App development and upgrade. However, in this mode, developers need to write different codes according to different platforms, so the requirements for configuration and capability of the R&D team are not too low. At the same time, the overly standardized process under the original development leads to a long App release cycle, inability to keep up with the pace of product update and poor flexibility.

Therefore, for innovative exploration of new business scenarios and high-frequency marketing appeals, more and more APPS choose to carry them through H5 single page. However, the loading speed and user experience of H5 pages require targeted and in-depth optimization schemes to barely meet the requirements of the business side.

Prediction of mobile App technology evolution

Mobile Internet traffic trends

Against the background of the peak growth of Mobile Internet users in China, for new apps, if they want to break through the traffic dilemma, they need to further dig into the characteristics of segmentation groups and timely grasp the changes in user demand, so as to seize the opportunity of the “second half” of the Internet. According to the report of QuestMobile in 2019, the number of people sinking in China’s mobile Internet has shown scale effect, reaching 615 million.

• So what are the scenarios in which these people are active for the huge sunken traffic market?
• Is there an existing vertical market segment of user needs to be tapped and satisfied for the gold digger?

According to the active situation of sinking crowd in the subdivision, “online entertainment”, “online education”, “reading” and other scenes have achieved good traffic harvesting. Among them, the monthly active users of “online education” increased by 283.1 percent year-on-year, while the monthly active users of “collaborative office” increased by 68.3 percent year-on-year.

On the one hand, this means that the head traffic of mobile Internet begins to have a sinking effect, gradually spreading coverage around “live broadcast, short video, online reading” and other high-frequency scenes. At the same time, as a breakout player, “online education” is also rapidly occupying the attention and usage time of the sinking market.

An overview of the mobile technology ecosystem

For the second half of mobile Internet, what collective place faces is “flow predicament”.

From the perspective of technology, with the help of the unification of technology system, through the integration of more effective channels, so as to aggregate ecological effects. “Native App + small program + IoT terminal” will form a new traffic system. For new business, in addition to obtaining more traffic through alipay and wechat terminal with the help of small programs, it also forms a panoramic ecological flow network with third-party small programs and scene entrance based on its own App to break through the flow ceiling.

Evolution of mobile applications

• From the point of view of technical form: it deeply combines native application and small program to cover more terminal entrances, so as to effectively link channel effect.
• From the technical features: fast operation, traffic saving, continuous improvement and optimization of user experience.

Build apps with better performance

Alipay more than ten years of technology practice

As a national application, Alipay currently has more than 870 million annual active users in China and provides more than 200 services, while the crash rate remains below 5 per 10,000. Moreover, Alipay launches new functions and improvements every day. It is not easy to achieve today’s achievement, which is accumulated through a long time of practical experience.

In order to realize the dynamic super App, improve the robustness of the architecture, and support the challenges of rapid business iteration, large quantities and high concurrency, the Hybrid capability of the framework is the primary solution. Building on years of Hybrid experience, Alipay used Nebula as an H5 container that also hosted H5 offline packages and applets.

Benefits of H5 offline packages and applets

• H5 containers and offline packages:

• • Fully compatible with mainstream H5 framework, low migration cost
  • Use offline package technology, experience close to native, network request go native, efficient and safe.
  • Provides a unified UC kernel with guaranteed performance and stability
  • Offline packet difference update to save traffic
  • Provide fault tolerance mechanism, download failure to go online fallback
  • Reach customers in real time and deliver offline packages by pushing and pulling

H5 offline package has many advantages as a dynamic solution. However, one of its shortcomings is that it cannot control the quality. The broad front-end specification makes it extremely difficult to control the service. If all the services are our internal businesses, it is ok; if they are open to a third party, they need to be constrained by complete specifications. At this point, we need to introduce small programs to normalize the service and provide it to third parties.

• Applets features:

• • Unified applets architecture, which can be placed on any application developed based on mPaaS architecture
  • Powerful Web rendering engine
  • Provides various components to quickly implement services
  • Integrate offline package technology to reuse H5 plug-ins
  • Complete life cycle management

Four aspects of application optimization

• Package size is effectively reduced, saving traffic and storage.
• Services are no longer limited by release, fast release, fast iteration.
• Business development efficiency is more excellent, one development, multi-terminal operation.
• Apps are upgraded to platforms that offer premium services and load on demand.

Why mPaaS

All of Alipay’s technological accumulation and architectural practices in mobile terminal development have been opened to the outside world as part of Ant Group’s fintech.

The mPaaS we see today, namely the mobile development platform derived from Alipay App, provides a cloud-to-end one-stop solution for mobile development, testing, operation, and operation and maintenance. It can effectively reduce the technical threshold, reduce the research and development cost, improve the development efficiency, and help enterprises to quickly build stable and high-quality mobile apps.

We reconstructed the client of such national App as 12306 through mPaaS, so that people can use an App with good experience to purchase tickets. It only takes 2-3 months to build a 12306 with such a mature underlying framework as mPaaS. In addition to 12306, there are customers such as Guangfa Bank, Changshu Rural Commercial Bank, Shenzhen Rural Commercial Bank, CSDN, Coca Cola and so on, also completed the business restructuring in just a few months.

Practical application of mPaaS

In the past three or four years, CUSTOMER scenarios of mPaaS have covered financial institutions, government affairs, livelihood travel, Internet and other scenarios, demonstrating the versatility and applicability of the product.

In this process, many of the customers that mPaaS precipitated are the leaders in their vertical fields, which means that they have stronger motivation and high-quality case base to promote to more homogeneous enterprises.

Under the tide of “30 years of Internet technology application” and “industrial Internet”, helping enterprises to do digital transformation faces very different challenges. Obviously, a well-designed system architecture often does not blindly pursue cutting-edge technologies, but needs to be tailored to actual business scenarios and development status to create a clear and reasonable architecture to ensure high service availability and flexibility for continuous expansion and development.

The endgame for mobile development must be more open, faster and more stable. MPaaS will continue to evolve from business practices and innovate for the business to help more developers build superior performance and experience apps.

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