The Gist of WeChat Mini Program with Three Simple Case Studies

Being the “Facebook of China”, I’m sure you’ve heard of WeChat at some point. Reaching a staggering 1.1 billion Chinese users this year, WeChat is known as a messaging app, but it’s so much more than that. If there is “one app to rule them all”, WeChat is it for most Chinese. And Wechat Mini Programs made sure of it.

What are WeChat Mini Programs, exactly?

If you are not a programmer, they are lightweight apps that run in WeChat. Anything a web app can achieve, you can build and run as a WeChat Mini Program.

The functionalities you can integrate include but are not limited to:

• eCommerce with WeChat Pay
• WeChat Cards (For example gift cards)
• Livestreaming
• Geo-location / Maps
• Social media connections
• Notifications
• Mini-Games
• and many more

If you are a programmer, they are web apps, written in WeChat’s own framework and version of HTML(wxml), CSS(wxss), and JavaScript. A better way is to write a WeChat Mini-Program is to write a uni-app with the Vue.js framework so you can compile it to a WeChat Mini Program, an Alipay Mini Program, a web…