The monthly download volume of Bullet SMS is less than 6,000. Will Alipay be its life-saving straw?

Bullet Messenger was forced to take a roller coaster ride due to the gap between its tens of thousands of fans and the waning enthusiasm.

On September 28, Bullet Messenger launched its iOS 0.9.0 and Android 0.8.7 versions. The new version adds 6 sets of emojis and supports collection of emojis, forwarding messages to support rumors and sending, and one-click adding friends in the address book who have registered for Bullet Messenger. Most importantly, this version supports the function of sending red envelopes to individual friends, but it is currently released in batches, and group red envelopes will be supported in subsequent versions.

However, according to financial new media reports, on September 27, more than a month after Bullet SMS was launched, the estimated download volume has dropped from the peak of 568,000 on August 28 to 5,960, less than one percent of the peak period a month ago. Based on this, it can be judged that the bottleneck of Bullet SMS's development has emerged and it is truly facing a big test.

According to official data released by Bullet Messenger, as of September 20, the total number of Bullet Messenger users has reached nearly 7.5 million, with users from Guangdong, Beijing and Jiangsu ranking in the top three places of origin. Nearly 20% of users use Bullet Messenger for more than half an hour every day. In the 30 days since Bullet Messenger was launched, it has topped the App Store social chart for 13 days and the overall chart for 9 days.

The two sets of data point to different directions for the current status of Bullet SMS. What is the actual situation of Bullet SMS?

The author checked Qimai data and found that Bullet Messenger's ranking reached its lowest point in a month on September 24, falling to 52nd place in the App Store social list (free) and 1050th place in the overall list (free).

36Kr also saw through the WeChat Index that Bullet Messenger was launched on August 20, and the WeChat Index reached a peak around August 30, and then showed a cliff-like decline.

"The biggest annoyance after installing it is that I have no friends to chat with," a Bullet Messenger user told 36Kr. "At the time, I was curious and saw that many people had installed it, but later no one talked to each other, so many people uninstalled it."

The user showed 36Kr a screenshot of a chat in a group called "Bullet SMS Activity Test Group". The picture showed that Bullet users would ask from time to time whether there were still people in the group, but there were few responses, and all of them conveyed the message that "there are not many people left."

As a social product that was made popular by Luo Yonghao with "feelings", Bullet Messenger has attracted much attention for its efficient communication functions such as voice input, text input and "voice input, text output", and has been favored by a large amount of capital. It won 150 million yuan in Series A financing just 7 days after its launch, and "those who are too late will have to wait for Round B."

But when the user's short-lived curiosity is over, how to enhance user stickiness and attract a steady stream of new users becomes a problem that Bullet Messenger needs to solve urgently. Otherwise, Bullet Messenger can only leave a lonely back after the craze subsides.

Voice input may seem like a gimmick, but it is actually very replaceable. According to financial reports, the current mobile phone voice recognition technology is quite mature. The model of Bullet SMS is actually voice recognition integration, that is, calling the voice recognition API, which other companies can also do.

Thus, a new version of Bullet Messenger was born.

As the "first spokesperson" of Bullet Messenger, Luo Yonghao has revealed on Weibo many times that "Alipay will soon enter Bullet Messenger". The industry speculates that it may be connected at the product level or at the investment level. Now it seems that the red envelope function is the means for Alipay to enter.

The cooperation between Bullet Messenger and Alipay shows that Bullet Messenger did not choose WeChat Pay, the other half of the mobile payment industry, but Alipay. In fact, it is equivalent to standing on the opposite side of WeChat. After all, WeChat is Bullet Messenger's biggest competitor in the social field. On the other hand, Alipay's ambition to engage in social networking remains, and this cooperation can also help it further develop in the social field.

Bullet Messenger launched the frequently used red envelope function that is popular among Chinese people before the National Day, unveiling the mystery of what Luo Yonghao called "Davi's new user acquisition plan", but no more eye-catching new functions have been released. Bullet Messenger seems to be on a development path similar to WeChat.

Faced with the Tencent Empire, which has already built an insurmountable "iron wall" in the social field, Bullet Messenger must tear open a social gap that has not been touched by predecessors, rather than "using WeChat's way to defeat WeChat."

Based on past experience, applications such as Momo and Tantan have found the entrance to stranger social networking, and DingTalk has found the entrance to enterprise social networking. Bullet Messenger also needs to find more vertical users for itself, rather than just "making a super efficient instant messaging software."

The latest Qimai data shows that on September 28, after the new version was launched, the estimated download volume of Bullet Messenger reached 9,197, a slight increase from the previous 5,960. However, in the short term, the landscape of the social field will not change much.