The Shenzhen airport 3A warehouse was previously filled with hundreds of thousands of phones. The somewhat seemingly endless stack was compiled of different smartphones that come fresh from certain factory production lines. Some time later that day, all of these phones would then be shipped from China and make its way towards major cities all around the world.
According to the complete story laid out by the South China Morning Post, over in Beijing, the ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming along with the executive Zeng Qiang were both pouring over the pre-installs spreadsheet as part of their daily routine. It was said that the data was laid out in rows and that multiple factors were then digested and analyzed.
These factors included the following:
30-day retention rates
A/B tests
Device models
Coverage rates
All these factors would then go into a complex system that tried to optimize ByteDance's budget in order to properly lay down what was known to be the "most effective" way that the company could hack new users and grow the company even more.
How ByteDance made use of the pre-install hack to win over new users
The ultimate grey market that ByteDance was said to use was by cutting deals with different phone distributors to automatically pre-install certain apps onto the given phones after leaving the factory but right before reaching the consumers.
When ByteDance initially allocated the budget for being able to pre-install its applications to certain smartphones, the initial budget was at 0.4 yuan or $0.06 per install which although was above the previous market rate, it was still very cheap. Over the span of four years, the price then continually started to rise up to over 12 yuan or $1.68 per install.
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ByteDance scale the popularity of apps like TikTok and more
The pre-install technique would work very efficiently as users of the new device would proceed to try out the feature while still exploring the new device that they had just bought. This is the first step of ByteDance in getting people to try out their applications like the most popular TikTok and also a few others.
Once the pre-installed app has finally made its way to a potential user, since it is already in the phone, the chances of the app being uninstalled are highly unlikely. On the other hand, it is also very likely that due to the app being pre-installed, the user will grow accustomed to using it.
The circle of marketing then spreads with users themselves promoting the pre-installed app to the people they know through Facebook or other means of communication. This is one of the ways that ByteDance was able to successfully scale TikTok and its other apps that have now gained them an almost untouchable status in the face of the mobile app world and is now even planning to open an IPO for the app according to CNBC.
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This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Urian Buenconsejo
