Tencent is everywhere, WeChat is ubiquitous, WeChat Mini Program is a big thing, much like Alipay, Taobao, TMall, WeChat Pay. All retails - from big department stores to local restaurants and street foods owners - support and provides WeChat Mini Program for convenience of service. It's hard to contemplate the development market for this: image everyone owns a mini program like everyone owns a mobile phone. It's that advanced.

Some of the biggest innovations of WeChat mini programs are:

1. Tightly integrated ecosystem in an embedded host (WeChat)
2. Streamlined development process with standardized app framework and client-server model
3. WeChat authentication and add-on services (like integrated payment)
4. Features like push notification, OCR, biometrics, transactions, customer services, account management, subscriptions, rich navigation, data analytics, multimedia (map, image, video, audio), workers, third-party integrations etc.
5. Front-end with WXML and WXSS, front-end logic with JavaScript. App is organized with "pages".

Notice one cultural trait with Chinese (and some Japanese) apps/websites is to make heavy use of (non-adaptive) graphical assets to do decorations.

To publish one's own mini program, the registration process is smooth: they ask for company name, ID, and contact name, id. Then the authentication part is where things get tricky, and there are seven steps:

1. Weixin Official Account Registration And Verification Application Form, affix with the company seal
2. Operation Authorization Letter, affix with the company seal
3. Identity documents
4. Persona/Business Mobile or credit card transaction records of the past three months
5. Contact ID document scans
6. Optional trademark authorization documents
7. Payment methods

Some of them are reasonable; Others not so straightforward.

On the other hand, the development platform offers all kinds of integrated services from reporting, customer feedbacks, to integrated payments, and advertisements.

I haven't been able to proceed to the stage to test, debug and deploy apps. According to the doc, the tooling support seems limited at this moment.

Useful references:

• Core Architecture Note
• Official tutorial
• English documentation