Now WeChat’s mini apps manage an incredible 1.1 billion transactions every day for over 440 million people. Launched in 2017, WeChat’s mini app count reached over 500,000 with over 170 million daily active users within just a year.

The platform famously invented mini-apps which load virtually instantly and do everything from payments to small games to food delivery shopping to social networking. Helpfully, The Helpful Panda shares a list of the key ones, along with their Western equivalents. Mobile is such a key part of life that virtually everyone needs a set of apps just to navigate everyday life. (Payment apps are so essential the New York Times has said “don’t even try paying cash” in China.

Videos on China-equivalent versions of YouTube and Netflix have almost 94% penetration, and payment apps - almost essential for everyday life in a Chinese city - have an also massive 86.4% usage rate. Īlmost every single person who has a smartphone in China uses messaging apps, which have a combined 99.2% penetration. The hottest categories are Messaging and Videos, according to China Internet Watch. Along with, of course, Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok which is owned by the same company, ByteDance, and multiple games and apps from Tencent. QQ, WeChat, Alipay, Taobao, Baidu, games from Tianti, and an anti-fraud app from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security highlight some of the top apps right now in China. and European charts have relatively familiar names like WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram, Google Maps, Messenger, Snapchat, Gmail, and YouTube, the Chinese market looks very different. In other words: China is both a massive opportunity and a significant challenge.Īnd that means that anyone looking to enter this market needs to carefully take stock: what works in China? How can you successfully enter the market? What’s hot now: Chinese apps and gamesĪ quick look at the top 10 apps right now in China highlights some of the key differences. And its isolation is unique: the great firewall of China has very specific requirements for the apps and services that it allows in, and prevents much of the outside tech world from entering.Īnd as a top-10 country in terms of smartphone penetration with little of North America’s and Europe’s legacy of desktop/laptop computing, almost all of China’s digital market and internet penetration is mobile. By some reports China accounts for 40% of mobile app spending. Its digital advertising market is massive: $80 billion in 2020 and with growth between 20-25% over the past few years, almost certainly higher in 2021. Its size is unique: 989 million internet users out of a population of 1.4 billion.

Interested in testing the waters in the Chinese mobile ecosystem?Ĭhina is almost literally a different world for mobile developers.

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