Is “use it and leave it” outdated? Lessons from the Battle Between Two Giants of Android Optimization Tools

Zhang Xiaolong said in a public speech last year that a good product should allow users to “use it and leave”. Some people disagree. WeChat accounts for more than 30% of the total time people spend on their mobile phones. This year's series of WeChat revisions such as Look and Search are still aimed at allowing users to be more deeply immersed. The so-called "use it and leave" may just be the humble words of the winner.

Tool product teams have all struggled with this: should they insist that users leave as soon as they leave, or should they “let the bullet fly for a while”? From the perspective of a product manager , user experience is the first rule. Products should meet people’s usage needs as much as possible. The greatest virtue of a product is that it is “easy to use”. However, the operations manager’s position is that for a tool product with tens of millions of active users and hundreds of millions of installations, it would be a waste of resources if it did not introduce some content and leave more promotional space for partners!

Taking third-party optimization tools as an example, Cheetah Clean Master has always been a leader, followed closely by 360 Clean Master. Tools such as Tencent Mobile Manager and Baidu Mobile Guard do not promote "cleaning" acceleration as their main focus. Most of the other optimization tools have no prominent brands and a relatively small user base. Therefore, the optimization tool market is a competition between the two major security vendors, Kingsoft and 360.

Judging from the name "Cheetah", software acceleration is its traditional advantage. In the second half of last year, Cheetah Mobile announced in the media that it would transform itself into a content company with tools as traffic entrances in order to gain more user time. This is probably a precursor to abandoning the "use it and leave it" nature of tools.

According to the latest data released by QuestMobile, Analysys Qianfan, TalkingData and other authoritative data organizations, 360 Clean Master's user scale ranking has surpassed Cheetah Clean Master to become the number one in the "Optimization" category. Does “use it and go” apply to products? What is the reality of the battle between the two optimization giants?

1. When Cheetah Cleaner, which was created to solve Android's lag problem, also began to dream of becoming a "headline news"

It is easy for Apple phone users to overlook a basic fact: Android phones have a market share of nearly 80% in China. However, Android phones generally become slower the more they are used. This is because there are many apps installed and a large cache; or because the phone is silently installed with too many privacy permissions enabled, causing programs to run in the background and consume power quickly. In short, installing an optimization tool is essential for normal use of your mobile phone.

In addition to basic functions such as application acceleration, data cleaning, and file management, Cheetah Clean Master and 360 Clean Master also have cleaning templates specifically for WeChat and QQ, as well as startup management, privacy management, phone cooling, software download and other functions. It can be said that the optimization tool uses "phone cleaner" as the entrance and does the work of "chief eunuch", with extremely high retention and activity.

In the second half of the mobile Internet , Cheetah Clean Master, which has nearly 600 million installed users and 60 million daily active users, has shifted its focus from competing for mobile phone coverage to the "time battlefield". Cheetah Mobile, which does not have a "media gene", launched the "Cheetah Information Flow Open Platform" in March 2017, and Cheetah Clean Master has transformed into a leading traffic platform.

In fact, whether it is Baidu Mobile, Universal WiFi Key or other tool-type products such as UC Browser , they all started out as UGC platforms and soon became a paradise for number makers to publish grassroots content in batches. Cheetah, as a latecomer in the content arena, was not spared. After I used Cheetah Cleaner to "clean" the garbage on my phone, I was swiped into "Today's Hot Topics". An advertisement appeared every time I swiped about 5 small pieces of content. These hot topics were absolutely beyond the reach of the " UC Shock Department ". Some users on Weibo complained about their dissatisfaction with the low-level content.

In order to extend user time, Cheetah Clean Master has also added headlines, novels, e-commerce (linked to Tmall Mall), games and other items to the "Discover" section, and even brought the Cheetah family bucket. Cheetah's other mobile phone management software, "Cheetah Security Master", will also have an endless flow of information after scanning the data.

2. Two cleaning masters, one is on the left to realize commercialization, and the other is on the right to improve product experience

The content of Cheetah Clean Master is very similar to the style of Toutiao three years ago. There is no "precise blocking" feedback button in the lower right corner of each information flow, and it is impossible to achieve personalized push for thousands of people. This is also inconsistent with Cheetah's own artificial intelligence strategy. Even if it is doing artificial intelligence, it cannot be at the expense of product experience.

360 Clean Master surpassed Cheetah Clean Master not by picking up loopholes to become the number one. 360 Clean Master did not place "unpleasant" content in its products to reap traffic dividends, and is still making some "marginal" technical innovations to solve the pain point of relatively insufficient mobile phone memory for users.

I have had 360 Cleanup Master installed on my Huawei phone for more than a year, and gradually discovered that there is a lot of technical content behind its fool-style cleaning process. For example, I often hold media conferences and take a lot of photos. Using 360 Cleanup Master can automatically filter out some duplicate, continuous, blurred, too bright or too dark photos; I downloaded 2G of " Dangal" some time ago. "Dad ", the phone was obviously running laggy, but it was compressed to 100 MB using Cleanup Master, and the image quality was still clear; there are various groups doing industry research in QQ, and the messages in them are in a state of accepting but not reminding. 360 Cleanup Master can identify and clean some caches, junk images, etc. with one click.

Nowadays, the cleaning tasks of Android phones are constantly changing. For example, in the face of users' screenshots, high-pixel photos, and small videos and short video applications that can be taken at any time, the content of 2-3G of the mobile phone is relatively insufficient, which requires the provision of functions such as file moving, compression, and cloud storage. In order to solve the problem of excessive mobile phone cleaning software, it is still necessary to optimize tools and make technological breakthroughs in intelligent recognition, intelligent interception, intelligent cleaning, etc. This itself is the application stage of artificial intelligence. Why go far away to create content? !

It is not difficult to see that Cheetah Clean Master focuses more on exploring the commercial value of the product, and the product design is directed towards extending user time to attract more advertisements; while 360 ​​Clean focuses more on the practical value of product tools, and quietly makes an optimization tool.

After the launch of the QM rankings, the Cheetah Clean Master official account released the "QM Report: Cheetah Clean Master's Average Monthly Usage Time Ranked First in the Industry". The average monthly usage time of Cheetah Clean Master is 107 hours, while the average monthly usage time of 360 Clean Master, which ranks first in user scale, is only 28 hours. This further verifies that Cheetah is dragging users to "kill time" (Kill time); and 360 Clean Master insists on trying its best to help users save time (Save time), which can be said to be a win-win situation.

3. Re-examine the values ​​of tool products: Is it user-first or advertising-first?

Objectively speaking, the final direction of any tool product is commercialization. There is no free lunch in the world. Last year, Axing also wrote an article titled "Why the Advertising Model is the Life-saving Straw for Internet Companies" to vindicate the advertising model. Small and beautiful products have the difficulty of supporting the team and the pressure from the capital market as listed companies, but this is no excuse for tool products to be filled with clickbait , advertisements and hodgepodge.

Product people who reject the tool-based "use it and go" concept may fall into this superstition:

(1) “The length of a product’s development time is positively correlated with its commercial value.” In fact, one of the applications that takes the longest time to develop is the video and live broadcast platform , but the advertising value is not great, and the user portrait is not clear and accurate;

(2) “The activity of content is proportional to user stickiness.” Users are simply unintentionally or manipulated by algorithmic mechanisms to browse meaningless content for entertainment. Users trust information produced by professional media platforms or traditional media more. Spam content is unlikely to trigger users’ decision-making mechanisms.

(3) “The more advertisements you put out, the better the product KPI will be.” Overdrawing a product’s traffic in the short term may lead to a loss of user trust in the long term.

After Cheetah Clean Master created content, it was no longer sensitive to the optimization needs of mobile phone users. For example, improvements in mobile phone text message classification and interception, video and photo compression technology, and intelligent anti-deletion technology gave 360 ​​Clean Master the opportunity to catch up, thus losing its core advantage in this category.

The author believes that Mobile Cleaner, like PC antivirus software, cannot succeed through an advertising model, but the strategic value of incubating other products cannot be underestimated. Other tool products that use advertising to monetize content need to consider the following factors:

(1) Is the content recommended to users relevant and compatible with product users? For example, Meitu Xiuxiu recommends cosmetics or women's e-commerce products, etc.; Master Lu's content section "Lu Xun" does mobile phone hardware reviews, etc.
(2) Does advertising placement affect the use of the product’s core functions, thereby causing user disgust? Some users uninstalled Cheetah Clean Master not because they were tired of the content, but because the ads were too crude and ugly; however, users also liked the ads on WeChat Moments and used them to spread them.
(3) Is the platform team good at creating content? Even if you are good at something, you cannot rush into it. The overall quality of the platform is often original content from the editorial team > PGC from expert KOLs > UGC from users. What is least lacking now is content platforms, such as the traffic diversion cooperation between multiple 360 ​​mobile products and Beijing Time.

In addition, the content itself is also an information "product" and also follows the "use it and go" efficiency principle.

Conclusion

You have to solve the same problem. Would you choose a bulky and cumbersome product or a "use it and go" product? If Zhang Xiaolong had not resisted the calls within Tencent to turn WeChat into a game or advertising tool when the number of WeChat users exceeded 200 million, WeChat might not have its current dominant position on the mobile platform, and the long-term pattern of using it and leaving it would have been implemented in mini-programs .

The battle between the two giants in the "optimization" category may seem like a decline in the installation volume of Cheetah Clean Master, but the deeper reason is the result of the rush to commercialize the super tool and paralyzing the dynamic needs of users.

This is a warning to product managers to respect user usage habits and cherish the "original intention" of the product. Any reckless attempt to quickly convert users through advertising will sow the seeds for the product to fall behind in the competition and become lackluster in innovation.