— Blog · notes

Notes from
the pond. what we write while making things

Experiment logs, release notes, things we learned building them. We write about what went strange more often than what went well.

14 notes, unedited-ish

2026

(14)
November 5, 2026｜China’s Top 20 WeChat Mini Games by PopularityPuzzles take fourteen of the top twenty spots, while last report’s risers reveal different paths after the climb.Games#games #wechat October 30, 2026｜China’s Top20 WeChat Mini GamesPuzzles gain ground, but rebounds, sudden climbs and recent declines tell different stories.Games#games #wechat October 22, 2026｜China’s WeChat Mini-Game Popularity Top 20Stable leaders and faster turnover among puzzles, with different signals from popularity and spending ranks.Games#games #wechat Piano Games: Their History and Today’s Popular Titles — Console, Mobile and WeChatPiano games share simple inputs, but songs, replay goals and platform habits shape very different experiences.Games#games #music October 14, 2026｜China's WeChat Mini-Game Popularity Top20Stable leaders, four new card and board entries, and different signals from popularity and spending ranks.Games#games #wechat October 8, 2026｜China’s WeChat Mini Game Popularity Top20China’s WeChat mini game Top 20: seven-day trends, thirty-day stability, and popularity versus bestseller ranks as of October 8, 2026.Games#games #wechat Mini games: China made them an industry, Korea opened the door againIn China install-free mini games spread on ads and became an industry on payments; in Korea, where KakaoTalk's first try closed in 2023, Toss, KakaoTalk and One Store reopened the field from 2025; global platforms keep opening and closing theirs one by one.Games#games #platforms Install-free games are a sixth of China's game market — WeChat mini games in 2026Install-free mini-program games earned RMB 31.66 billion in China in the first half of 2026, a sixth of the game market growing three times as fast, and WeChat is now spending to keep players rather than to find new ones.Games#games #wechat No. 1 and a zero-day in the same week — Meta Muse's first three weeksMeta's personal AI agent Muse hit No. 1 on both US app stores within eleven days of its September 8, 2026 launch, in the same week it drew a Mac zero-day, an Amazon shopping block and a report of humans behind its phone calls.AI trends#ai #agents An hour apart on the same day, and 218 daysAnthropic and OpenAI shipped frontier models an hour apart on 22 September 2026; Google has not shipped one in 218 days.AI trends#ai #market Jev, the AI that writes nothingJev picks one of your predefined answers and attaches a probability instead of writing text; a week of outside measurements shows where that is fast and cheap, and where it is not good enough.AI trends#ai #games Where do users come fromAn indie developer was billed for 56 installs and 33 were bots; we have eight apps and the same question, so here is what we do instead of buying installs.Work#growth #ads Why we can't put 'Rubik's' in a cube app's nameRubik's Cube is a registered trademark and both app stores forbid other people's marks in app names, so our cube app is called Cube at a Glance.Work#naming #trademark Why we took React and Babel out of our home pageWhy a one-page studio site was shipping 4.2 MB of JavaScript, and what it ships now.Work#performance #static-site

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