Hey. It’s Brady again.
KrASIA previously published news about Jelly, a self-described metaverse social network that became extremely popular with Gen Z users in China.
You can think of it as the first Chinese metaverse that truly took off. Jelly briefly displaced WeChat as the most downloaded free app in the Apple App Store, bumping off the super app from a position it has maintained since 2019.
There are many factors that come together to explain Jelly’s popularity, including cutesy designs, the feature to create virtual “apartments” where friends can hang out, and our desire to separate public and private lives in virtual spaces. This boils down to Jelly’s capability to give Gen Z users a little bit of autonomy, and a degree of control over how they present themselves to each other online.
Mengyuan spoke with some users who enjoyed using the app before it was taken offline. You can read her report here.