How ByteDance mastered the art of smartphone app pre-installs to growth hack millions of new users
- The following is an edited excerpt from Matthew Brennan’s new book, Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance
- In the early years of news app Jinri Toutiao, ByteDance acquired tens of millions of users through pre-installation
The Shenzhen airport warehouse 3A was filled with phones, hundreds of thousands of them. Wall to wall, pallet after pallet, a seemingly endless stack of smartphones fresh from the factory production lines.
Later that day, all of them would be loaded onto planes and shipped out across China’s major cities, weaving their way through a byzantine system of provincial distributors, sub-distributors, and retail store networks before finally landing in the hands of a consumer.
A group of young men and women in grey overalls lined up for early morning duty. To a casual observer, these looked like a typical team of warehouse workers ready to load and unload cargo all day. Instead, the group had a very different task.
“Right, you know the drill – five minutes for each batch of 12 phones, not a second more. Let’s go!” called the group leader. They immediately set to work.
Another day’s worth of repetitive tasks lay ahead, following the same sequence: Use a special device to blow hot air on the phone box seal until the tape fell off. Carefully unbox the phone, making sure to keep everything in pristine condition.
Hook the phone up to the machine, a thick plastic box, with a screen roughly the size of an iPad and a row of 12 USB ports. Tap to select the correct options, then press “confirm.” Wait. Once the machine had done its thing, unhook the phone and put it back in the original box exactly as you found it, and reseal the tape.