154. The Mobile App That Brings the Whole World Together for a Meeting

From the moment he dropped his first major drawing stunt to captivate the audience tuning into his boring programming livestream, Li Daniu began employing various means to make the broadcast less tedious.

During the hours when most netizens were at work or resting, Li Daniu would honestly hunker down to code. Although his typing speed—or rather, his keyboard-clacking speed—was so fast that some visiting professionals considered it mere random smashing, it failed to hold the viewers' interest. Even when playing video games, merely showing one's hands was incredibly dull; viewers came for the thrill of human dexterity, micro-control, and continuous kills.

When coding, no matter how fast your fingers flew across the keyboard, there was no intuitive way for ordinary spectators to grasp the significance of the code, especially since Li Daniu refused to let the audience see what he was actually typing. Therefore, alternative methods were essential.

Whenever viewership peaked, Li Daniu would continuously roll out small surprises, many of which had nothing to do with programming at all. For instance, he deliberately arranged for Queen to call him and request a song, wrote an entire track—including the arrangement—in less than an hour, and had TC Entertainment's singers release it as a single with an accompanying music video. This not only promoted the song but further cemented Li Daniu's reputation as a genius. Only when the entire world grew accustomed to regarding Li Daniu as a genius could he continuously roll out works that left the world in awe.

During this period, because many netizens complained that such a livestream lacked effective interactivity, Li Daniu spent three hours programming a danmaku mini-program, which he then sold to Youto, where it was adopted in a very short time. With that, danmaku—this magical interactive medium—was introduced into this world.

How much it sold for didn't really matter, because mini-programs like this had no copyright protection to speak of; as soon as your product was out, others could easily copy it. Li Daniu had never heard of who invented danmaku in his past life, nor had he ever seen news of any website or video player paying copyright fees for using it. Most importantly, this little mini-program gave every netizen using Youto a sense of pleasant surprise. People accustomed to danmaku might have forgotten the thrill of first seeing their own words floating across a video, but to netizens in this world who had never witnessed danmaku before, it was nothing short of a genius invention.

Spread through the word-of-mouth of netizens watching the livestream, and swiftly copied by numerous video websites, Li Daniu's fame as a genius once again echoed across the globe. This was a program coded live in front of over twenty million viewers; from then on, no one ever dared to claim Li Daniu couldn't program. Trolls excluded, of course.

Through these continuous little surprises, Li Daniu managed to keep viewers hooked throughout his otherwise tedious livestream. The peak viewership reached an astonishing 32 million concurrent viewers—keep in mind, these 32 million were watching simultaneously, while the cumulative historical view count hit a miraculous 130 million. This meant that 130 million people had clicked on Li Daniu's livestream.

Even celebrities began imitating Li Daniu by launching their own livestreams, while sharp-nosed entrepreneurs spotted the business opportunities in live broadcasting and began establishing their own streaming platforms. However, none of this mattered to Li Daniu; he really looked down on livestreaming platforms as a money-making venture that yielded low returns and easily dragged one into endless drama.

What Li Daniu actually cared about was that his software was nearing completion. He had even successfully installed the world's first WeChat client on his own mobile phone. It was worth mentioning that about ninety percent of the mobile operating systems in this world were developed based on a single foundational architecture, somewhat akin to Android in his past life, except there was no iOS to contend with for market share. Therefore, Li Daniu didn't need to worry about compatibility issues between different operating systems or secondary development for various platforms, which would have otherwise drastically increased his workload.

The server infrastructure had already been set up by the newly established TC Network Technology Company. Aside from Mandarin and English—the two languages Li Daniu knew—the localization for other national language systems was handled entirely by TC Network's technical department.

After having everyone at TC Network install WeChat on their phones, Li Daniu began testing. Consequently, viewers tuning into the livestream could no longer watch Li Daniu pound away at the keyboard or pull off other surprises; instead, they simply saw him glued to his phone.

After three days of internal testing to iron out bugs, the mobile app was ready for public beta testing. Unlike physical products, software faced much simpler administrative procedures when rolling out downloads and usage across different countries. While Li Daniu was developing the software, TC Network had already established branch offices in major countries worldwide; with enough capital, these matters were easily resolved.

Thus, once Li Daniu concluded his livestream, he began running advertisements on Eyebook. Naturally, the singers under TC Entertainment offered their full-throated support to their boss's new product, flooding their feeds with recommendations for the app even though they hadn't started using it themselves yet.

Li Daniu and TC Entertainment's singers collectively boasted 120 million non-overlapping followers on Eyebook, while the global population currently stood at only 7 billion. This meant that at least one out of every seventy people knew about this software. Furthermore, during Li Daniu's twenty-day livestream, 130 million individual people had clicked in—not 130 million total clicks, but 130 million unique users.

Therefore, when the app finally launched on mobile app stores worldwide, download figures exploded instantly. Had TC Network not analyzed the market beforehand and made thorough preparations, this unbelievable wave of downloads alone would have thrown them into total chaos.

How many features could a piece of software built by a single person in twenty days possibly have? Perhaps, as Li Daniu had stated, it was simply a practical utility with a minimalist design—so simple that it was merely a messaging tool. However, downloading an app didn't cost much, even without Wi-Fi and using cellular data instead. Thus, driven by curiosity, countless people downloaded the mobile application named WeChat.

The registration process for WeChat was remarkably simple: just obtain a verification code via mobile number and you were good to go. Since people owned smartphones, how could they possibly lack a phone number?

Upon opening WeChat, users discovered that, if nothing else, the software's interface was exceptionally clean and intuitive. Just like in his past life, this version of WeChat featured a contact recommendation function. The moment the first person added their very first friend and began chatting, the magic unfolded.

Text messages? That was standard. Voice messaging? This seemed incredibly practical—did this mean phone calls would become obsolete in the future? Video and voice calls? Damn it, with this feature, people could really save a fortune on phone bills. Short video clips? This feature also seemed quite interesting. People nearby? Holy crap, this guy looks suspiciously like my dad... Shake? This function felt... somewhat intriguing.

When people across the world were captivated by the simplicity and utility of WeChat, having a blast playing with it, and even discovering that certain features could be used for ulterior motives, WeChat truly went viral.

Within twenty-four hours of WeChat's global simultaneous release, download and installation numbers hit 150 million, with registered users surpassing 140 million. In that same twenty-four-hour window, the number of messages sent by global WeChat users exceeded 37 billion.

This was a miracle forged by a combination of celebrity influence, genius, and wealth. Twenty-four hours later, social networking companies around the world panicked. Previously, they hadn't thought much of an app independently developed by Li Daniu; after all, even a professional project team backed by tens of millions of dollars and months of development wasn't guaranteed to conquer the market. What could a single man tinkering with a few computers for twenty days possibly achieve?

Yet reality left software developers worldwide utterly stunned. Not only that, mobile telecom operators in numerous countries began to panic as well, because they noticed that their revenues over the previous twenty-four hours had suddenly dropped by five to eight percent. Do not underestimate this percentage; a mere one percent of their daily income was a sum most ordinary people could never earn in a lifetime.

What could they do? Call an emergency meeting!