Era 04 · 2009–2015
Mobile Era
The internet goes in your pocket; users and traffic explode
- Start
- 2009-01-07 MIIT issues 3G licenses
- End
- In 2014 the share of mobile internet access surpasses PC for the first time, and 2015 brings "Internet Plus"; afterward the traffic dividend peaks
Background and drivers
- Hardware: smartphones drop sharply in price, and domestic sub-1,000-yuan phones (Xiaomi released its phone in 2011) bring smartphones to the masses; phones come with cameras, GPS, and all kinds of sensors.
- Network: from 3G (2009) to 4G (licenses issued at the end of 2013), data prices keep falling and Wi-Fi spreads.
- Capital: a mobile-internet startup boom, the "war of a thousand group-buy sites," the O2O subsidy wars, and the 2014-2015 "mass entrepreneurship and innovation."
- Users: internet users expand from urban white-collar workers to the whole population; mobile internet users reached 527 million in June 2014.
- Policy:
Pain points
- Screen-size and system fragmentation: the same page has to adapt to the iPhone, hundreds of Android phone models, and PCs.
- Mobile networks are slow and unstable, and phone performance and battery are limited.
- User counts and instantaneous traffic peaks explode (Singles' Day, Spring Festival travel ticketing, Spring Festival Gala red packets), and building your own data center can't scale up fast enough.
- App releases have to pass app-store review, and users don't necessarily update, so iteration is slow.
- Offline consumption and payment haven't moved online yet, and paying on a phone is a hassle.
- User behavior data grows many times over, and traditional databases can't analyze it.
- Servers keep multiplying, and releases and operations are done by hand, which is error-prone.
- Account passwords leak on a massive scale (the 2011 CSDN incident), phones get malware and premium-rate fraud, and development toolchains get poisoned (the 2015 XcodeGhost); privacy and data-security problems surface.
- Acquiring new users for an app gets more and more expensive, and the traffic dividend begins to peak.
New technology and practices
- Responsive design (2010), HTML5, and mobile-first -> pain point 1: one set of pages adapts to many kinds of screens.
- Native apps (iOS/Android) and hybrid development (Hybrid, and React Native in 2015) -> pain points 1 and 2: get better performance and offline capability on phones.
- Node.js (2009), frontend-backend separation, and RESTful APIs -> pain point 1: the backend only provides interfaces, and the same set of interfaces serves the web, iOS, and Android at once.
- Cloud computing (Alibaba Cloud in 2009, AWS going mainstream) and elastic scaling -> pain point 3: add machines temporarily during big sales and ticket rushes, then release them afterward.
- Hot updates, embedding H5 pages inside apps, and gradual rollouts -> pain point 4.
- QR codes plus mobile payment (Alipay Wallet, WeChat Pay in 2013, Spring Festival red packets in 2014) -> pain point 5: offline consumption moves onto the phone, and O2O takes off as a result.
- Hadoop/Spark big-data platforms and NoSQL -> pain point 6: user behavior can be collected, stored, and analyzed.
- DevOps, automated deployment, and Docker containers (2013) -> pain point 7: consistent environments and one-click releases.
- The spread of HTTPS, mobile security testing, enterprise security response centers (SRCs), and the white-hat community -> pain point 8.
- Personalized recommendations (Toutiao launched in 2012) and deep-learning breakthroughs in image and speech recognition (AlexNet in 2012) -> an early answer to pain point 9: use algorithms to raise the value of each user. This leads into the next era.
Roles of this era
- FrontendFrontend Engineer
Builds mobile H5 and responsive pages, uses Node.js for build tools and a middle layer, and SPA frameworks appear (AngularJS, and React in 2013).
- BackendBackend Engineer
Writes APIs, builds high-concurrency systems (flash sales, ticket rushes, red packets), and begins splitting services apart.
- ProductProduct Manager
Mobile product managers focus on growth, retention, and conversion, and "user growth" becomes a methodology.
- DesignInteraction Designer
UI design moves from skeuomorphic to flat (iOS 7 in 2013), centering on app interfaces and icons, and design guidelines start to become systematic.
Shifts from manual operations toward automation and DevOps, and starts using cloud servers.
- SecuritySecurity Engineer
Mobile application security and business security (anti-cheating, anti-fraud), with enterprise SRCs collaborating with white-hat hackers.
- OperationsOperations Specialist
User growth and campaign operations become the core work, corresponding to the operations role page `/roles/operations/`.
Security & law thread
- China2009-02-28: Amendment (VII) to the Criminal Law (the text has not yet been downloaded; source to be added) added the crimes of "selling or illegally providing citizens' personal information" and "illegally obtaining data from a computer information system."
- China2012-12-28: the Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on Strengthening the Protection of Online Information (original text (in Chinese)(opens in a new window)).
- China2013-10-25: the second amendment to the Law of the People's Republic of China on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests (effective 2014-03-15) wrote personal information protection into Articles 14 and 29 (current version (in Chinese)(opens in a new window)). The original law was passed on 1993-10-31 and took effect on 1994-01-01 (1993 original version, scanned gazette (in Chinese)(opens in a new window)).
- China2014-02-27: the Central Leading Group for Cybersecurity and Informatization was established.
- China2015-08-29: Amendment (IX) to the Criminal Law (the text has not yet been downloaded; source to be added) established the crimes of "infringing on citizens' personal information" and "refusing to perform information-network security management obligations."
- Security incidents2011-12: tens of millions of plaintext-password accounts leaked from CSDN and other sites, and the term "credential stuffing" caught on.
- Security incidents2013-06: the Snowden affair; the world begins to take encryption and data sovereignty seriously.
- Security incidents2014-04-07: the OpenSSL "Heartbleed" vulnerability is disclosed, and the security of open-source foundational components gains attention.
- Security incidents2015-09: XcodeGhost; a tampered development tool contaminated a large number of domestic apps, a textbook case of supply-chain security.
Key events
MIIT issues 3G licenses
Sina Weibo begins its closed beta
Alibaba Cloud is founded
Taobao Mall holds the first "Singles' Day"
Ethan Marcotte proposes "responsive web design"
Tencent releases WeChat
About 6 million CSDN users' plaintext passwords are made public, and leaks at Tianya and other sites follow
Sources: cert.org.cn(opens in a new window)
AlexNet wins the ImageNet competition, a deep-learning breakthrough
The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress issues the Decision on Strengthening the Protection of Online Information
Docker is open-sourced
Snowden discloses US mass-surveillance programs
MIIT issues 4G (TD-LTE) licenses
The Central Leading Group for Cybersecurity and Informatization is established
The "Heartbleed" vulnerability is disclosed
Google releases Kubernetes; the same month, China's share of mobile internet access (83.4%) surpasses PC (80.9%) for the first time
Sources: en.wikipedia.org(opens in a new window) · cac.gov.cn(opens in a new window)
"Internet Plus" is written into the government work report
Amendment (IX) to the Criminal Law is passed
The XcodeGhost incident
Google open-sources TensorFlow
On to the next era
Everyone now has a smartphone; new users are fewer and fewer and acquisition more and more expensive, while systems are split ever finer and data piles up ever higher. The industry's question becomes "how to earn more from existing users with data and algorithms" and "how to keep increasingly complex systems under control," and the misuse of data also begins to draw legislation.