The world’s largest App Clip deployment

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App Clips are an Apple iOS feature that allows users to use a subset of the functionality of a native app without having to first install the app from the App Store. The feature has failed to get traction to the point that most iPhone users in the world have probably never encountered an App Clip in the wild.<br>That is of course, unless you are in Mainland China, where App Clips are absolutely everywhere. This is thanks to Alibaba's payment company Alipay which is working overtime to convince users to pay with Alipay instead of Tencent's ubiquitous Weixin Pay.<br>Chinese users are in Weixin (formerly called WeChat) all day long chatting with friends, family, colleagues and customers. It's so ubiquitous that most users go straight to Weixin to scan QR codes instead of their phone's camera app as users do outside of the Chinese mainland. These QR codes are the entry point for menus and ticket sales and other e-commerce functions and you see them absolutely everywhere. . And when users enter the flow with Weixin, they almost always end up also paying with Weixin Pay.<br>Alipay, which got its start as the only payment method for Alibaba's popular Taobao e-commerce platform, has faced an uphill battle getting users to change this behavior and scan QR codes with Alipay instead of Weixin Pay. Instead of trying to change user behavior, they've instead introduced a new behavior that is even more convenient and lower friction than opening an app to scan a QR code. This behavior is called "碰一下” or "Tap it!"<br>See Alipay NFC + App Clip in action at a Pizza Hut in Foshan in the short video below:

As you can see, it's very similar to tap to pay using Apple Pay but Alipay had to implement it on iOS without the privileged hardware access on iPhones that Apple reserves for itself. To do this they combined NFC and iOS App Clips. It works like this: an NFC tag is on a table, sign or payment device and tapping an iPhone on it causes iOS to load the the Alipay App Clip. If you don't have Alipay installed, you're prompted to download it, if you do have it installed, you're prompted to tap the "open" button to complete the transaction in Alipay.<br>Tap your iPhone to order Burger King via Alipay & its App Clip.If the NFC tag is a link to a mini app ("小程序"), tapping open opens the mini app in Alipay so you can browse the menu and place your order. If the NFC tag is from a point-of-sale device, tapping open automatically pays your bill using your default payment settings in Alipay.<br>While Alipay appears to be the largest deployment of this NFC+App Clip technology in China, I have also come across use of the same technology NFC+App Clip by Bytedance's Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok).<br>Tap your iPhone to open Douyin via an App Clip and group buy a meal for a discount.The combination of NFC and App Clips is actually very elegant. It delivers most of the benefits of Apple Pay for payment while also offering an entry point for more customized payment and e-commerce flows using mini apps. It works so well that I'm surprised we don't see this combination of NFC + App Clips in more markets.

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