Chapter 134: Downloads Surpass 10 Million, Factory Treatment (Begging for Monthly Tickets)

On the second day of the Dragon Boat Festival, Lashou. com submitted its IPO prospectus to the Lighthouse Nation Securities and Exchange Association, planning to raise 100 million US dollars.

Mama Ali announced that Yitao. com would operate independently, adding a price-comparison search function; unable to compete with Fox Tao in the branded flash-sale space, it instead strengthened its own tool-like attributes.

Shortly after, Lei Yijun publicly revealed for the first time the R&D progress of the Xiaomi phone, saying the first model would be released in August.

Far away in Shanghai, after securing 1 million US dollars in funding from Jin Sha Ventures, Did Zhang Xuhao rapidly expanded his team, extending the business from the Jiaotong University campus to the surrounding area.

The increasingly fierce competition in the group-buying industry made Did Zhang Xuhao understand one thing: he had to seize more market share in the food-delivery track before other internet giants entered the game.

However, at this time, mainstream domestic venture capital firms were not optimistic about the profit model of food delivery.

Marketing, rider recruitment, technical R&D, and merchant management all required massive capital investment, while revenue from the merchant and user sides could hardly cover the costs.

It was destined to remain in a long-term loss-making state!

After putting in 1 million US dollars, Jin Sha Ventures regretted it not long after; the money was only enough for Did Zhang Xuhao to upgrade the website to version 2.0 and make an initial foray into the white-collar market.

By the beginning of June, the website had only 30,000 registered users and fewer than 4,000 daily orders.

This was why Chen Yansen was in no rush to do food delivery: first, the cost of cultivating the market and users was too high; second, smartphone penetration was low and 4G networks had not yet launched.

Although 3G networks showed a trend of speed increases and price reductions, data costs remained high.

In the future, Did Zhang Xuhao would spend over a billion yuan cultivating the market, only to turn around and face his lifelong arch-rival — Meituan Waimai.

Wang Xin, relying on tens of thousands of ground-pushing iron troops, beat Ele. me into repeated retreat, forcibly knocking the market leader down to second place.

But in this life, whether Wang Xin could emerge from the Thousand-Group War remained unknown.

After all, the first half of the year was almost over, and Meituan's market share had yet to break into the top three, being firmly suppressed by Ju Hua Suan, Lashou, Gao Peng, and Nuomi. com.

Behind them, Wo Wo Tuan, 58 Group-buy, F-Tuan, and Dianping were catching up, along with Fox Tao stirring up trouble.

Even though Meituan promptly launched its thoughtful "Expired Refund" service, it failed to make big waves in the industry.

Because Lashou, Gao Peng, and Nuomi. com immediately followed suit, turning Meituan's signature service into an industry standard.

On June 8, Chen Yansen moved Sister Chengzi Tech to Zhuxianzhuang Tech Park; the Aurora OS R&D team was on the second floor, and the third floor was the shared workspace for over a dozen hardware and industrial design engineers.

At the entrance there were only a few flower baskets sent by the property management, no firecrackers were set off to celebrate, and the moving process was very low-key.

But Chen Yansen was far more high-profile online, adding a pop-up ad on the Fox Tao homepage, announcing externally that the Aurora OS beta had gone live.

At the same time, on the Sister Chengzi Tech official website, Sister Chengzi Community, Third App Shangcheng, and developer forum, there were either pinned posters or heavy ad spending.

Fox Tao users who downloaded and installed Aurora OS could also receive a random red packet of 3 to 88 yuan.

If users discovered system function defects and submitted them in the feedback section of Sister Chengzi Community, once adopted, they would receive a reward ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 yuan.

This was different from when Fox Tao launched; back then Chen Yansen only had five or six hundred thousand yuan in hand and could only play some tricks.

Now with ample funds, he directly switched on the money-sprinkling mode.

Fox Tao, with 3.2 million daily active users, gained 280,000 new downloads that day.

For Chen Yansen, this cost was only a few hundred thousand yuan, still cheaper than the ad slots on Wandoujia, Yingyongbao, and 360 Mobile Assistant.

On the day Aurora OS launched, downloads across all channels reached as high as 890,000!

The figure Chen Yansen announced on Weibo was 1 million!

This caused a sensation in the industry; someone like Chen Yansen, who was both willing to invest money and had strong traffic from his own website, had an extremely obvious advantage during the product launch phase.

The second day, downloads across all channels were 1.41 million!

The third day, downloads across all channels were 1.17 million!

The fourth day, downloads across all channels were 930,000!

The fifth day, downloads across all channels were 840,000!

The sixth day, downloads across all channels were 730,000!

The seventh day, downloads across all channels were 520,000!

In just one week, AuroraOS (Aurora System) had a total of 6.49 million downloads; based on launch counts, page views, and user dwell time, the deduplicated usage figure was actually 7.8 million.

This was because many users' installation packages were shared with them by classmates, friends, or relatives, and were not counted in the channels' statistics.

As usage increased, more and more bugs were exposed.

For example, clicking a number from an SMS to dial would suddenly crash; playing music, the lock screen wouldn't display song information; when modifying permissions, the confirm button would fail, and so on.

With various minor issues popping up constantly, Wang Teng could only spend all day on Sister Chengzi Community collecting user feedback.

A week later, AuroraOS updated to version 1.01, fixing dozens of minor bugs in one go.

Users who had flashed their phone systems to Aurora OS discovered that Aurora OS's memory cleanup function was extremely powerful.

Users could either manually clear the cache with one tap, or authorize the system to divide the cache and app junk files into three categories — young generation, old generation, and metaspace data — by age and usage frequency, and clean them every 30 minutes.

This was the generational garbage collection algorithm Chen Yansen had previously mentioned to Wang Teng!

It greatly alleviated the problems of insufficient user memory and phone lag!

Upon learning this news, Lei Yijun immediately had the R&D center staff use decompilation tools to convert AuroraOS's binary code into pseudocode and analyze the call logic of the memory management module.

But soon, the team reported back that AuroraOS's code had obfuscated key class and method names, making decompilation far more difficult; the core memory partition ratios, cleanup trigger conditions, and concurrency handling methods were all very hard to reproduce.

"This kid is that good?"

Lei Yijun sat in his office, looking at Lin Bing as he asked.

Although he had over twenty years of programming experience, in recent years his work had shifted to a management role; he only felt that AuroraOS's garbage cleanup function worked very well, but couldn't gauge the difficulty of the code implementation.

"Very impressive! Our MIUI system, although it has also been optimized in memory management and garbage cleanup, the actual effect is far inferior to AuroraOS."

Lin Bing frowned and sighed.

"Don't waste effort trying to reverse-engineer AuroraOS's original algorithm; I just checked on the Intellectual Property Association's official website, and they've applied for patent protection."

Li Wanqiang suddenly spoke up to remind them.

"Generational garbage collection is a common technology; as long as we clarify their generational strategy and algorithm logic and roll out a similar feature set, they have no way to prove we copied them."

Lin Bing reflexively objected.

"They've proposed brand-new optimization points in adaptive thresholds and hybrid GC strategies; the fact that I can look them up means the Intellectual Property Association recognizes Sister Chengzi Tech's innovation."

Li Wanqiang shook his head, putting Lin Bing's idea to rest.

"Can we try to keep optimizing and develop a cleanup algorithm similar to AuroraOS?"

Lei Yijun listened to the two of them finish their discussion, then opened his mouth to ask.

Li Wanqiang and Lin Bing exchanged a glance, then nodded heavily and decided to give it a try.

The AuroraOS development team — they'd investigated — was mostly made up of R&D staff from Oppo, Huawei, and Meizu, and even included two engineers poached from Xiaomi.

If they could do it, there was no reason they couldn't!

At this moment, Oppo's Chen Yongming and Meizu's Huang Zhang were thinking the exact same thing.

One was developing ColorOS, the other FlymeOS; both had originally felt pretty good about themselves, but compared against AuroraOS, the gap was immediately obvious.

In 2011, smartphones had small memory, severe junk fragmentation, and were extremely prone to lag — a fatal flaw for young people, one that would be criticized for over a decade afterward.

Even though later Android smartphones, after dual upgrades to system and hardware, no longer lagged, most people still held a stereotype against Android phones, feeling they'd lag after two years of use.

Just as domestic phone makers were scrambling to catch up with AuroraOS's cleanup algorithm, this flashing craze spread from online to offline.

Whether in tier-one and tier-two cities, or in smaller tier-four and tier-five cities, plenty of digital accessory shops had recently added a new service: flashing phone systems for customers.

Flashing cost 10 yuan per phone; the more unscrupulous shop owners charged 20.

There were even more ruthless ones, quoting a steep 50 yuan.

Although Sister Chengzi's official website and Sister Chengzi's community both had flashing tutorials, for many people there was still an information gap and a technical barrier — which gave rise to a large crowd of flashing enthusiasts.

After AuroraOS's downloads broke 10 million, Chen Yansen stopped paying attention.

In mid-June, he spent all day on the third floor of the new office area, deeply involved in the exterior and structural design of the Chengzi phone.

Cao Dahua had gone out to oversee work and had not yet returned.

He and Zuo Hongyu were old partners; after more than twenty days of running around, the equipment needed for the production line was basically all purchased — assembly, packaging, and testing equipment included.

Eight production lines in total, running at full capacity, with an annual output of 4.8 to 6 million phones.

The two were busy assembling the production line, and at the same time had Zhou Jinling pull in the original HR manager from Ouhan Phone into Chengzi Tech's phone factory, to prepare for the next step of recruitment.

After all, this person knew Huqiangbei like the back of her hand, and had a large number of contacts at labor agencies — if someone else needed two or three months to recruit 500 workers, she could get it done in a week.

After hearing Zuo Hongyu's report, Chen Yansen did not raise any objection to Zhou Jinling joining Chengzi Tech — it was just an ordinary worker position, after all.

But when the new HR manager proposed recruiting through agencies, he rejected it on the spot.

The hardware design for the Chengzi phone wasn't finished anyway, so they could just use direct hiring — no need to go through agency recruitment channels.

These days, some agencies signed agreements with factories: wages were paid into the agency's account first, then distributed by the agency.

Chen Yansen figured it over — if the contracts with agencies and outsourced workers weren't under his own company's name, how could there be any Humaneness Sparks?

Most likely none!

That was the main reason he disagreed!

After hearing Chen Yansen's instructions, Zuo Hongyu, though he found it troublesome, still nodded in agreement.

"By the way, the factory's daily working hours must be aligned with yours — implement an 8-hour workday, with overtime pay strictly calculated according to the Labor Law."

Chen Yansen added one more sentence before hanging up.

"Huh!?" Zuo Hongyu was stunned — he'd been hustling in Shencheng for over ten years, and this was the first time he'd run into a boss like this.

The base pay for workers was 1,980 yuan per month, 8 hours a day (including a 2-hour lunch break and meal time); overtime on workdays was 1.5 times the hourly rate, 2 times on weekends, 3 times on holidays.

"Boss, if you do it this way, some workers might rather work overtime until they drop dead than get off work."

Zuo Hongyu reminded him cautiously.

"Just set upper limits on overtime hours per day, per week, and per month — good policies still depend on execution."

Chen Yansen said briefly, then hung up.

For a smartphone priced at 2,000 yuan, labor costs only accounted for 6 to 10 yuan; even if wages doubled, it wouldn't affect Chengzi Tech's profitability.

But an annual labor expenditure of tens of millions could yield several thousand extra Humaneness Sparks; once Chengzi phone's sales stabilized, tens of thousands of Humaneness Sparks a year would be no difficult feat.

(End of chapter)