Apps like TikTok and WeChat reportedly have millions of users around the world, and a bike-sharing app has already reached 200 cities.
Beijing: China’s social media and tech universe predictably bears no resemblance with that of the West.
While tech observers mostly talk about them in the context of the country’s strict internet censors, there is little China’s indigenous apps don’t offer the quintessential teenager. And they are getting popular the world over.
One of the most downloaded apps around the world of late is Tik Tok, where people can watch and produce quick videos with music, stickers and animation.
Also read: How Sundar Pichai caught employees off-guard with censored Google for China
Chinese tech giant Beijing Bytedance, which has produced the app, said the number of its global monthly users had hit 500 million. The statement came during an interaction with a media delegation from nine neighbouring nations that was in China on a tour organised by the country’s finance ministry.
Although widely seen as a censored Instagram, Tik Tok was the most downloaded non-game app in the Apple app store globally in the first quarter of 2018, with about 45.8 million downloads, the company said. Other popular apps include WeChat, a messaging and mobile payments app, which had over 1 billion active users in the same period.
“If China was developing these apps only for consumption in China because other websites and apps may not be allowed here, it wouldn’t have had such massive following in other countries,” a foreign ministry official said.
Breaking free
China’s app offerings are part of a larger push within the country to break free from its image as an emulator of Western technology. Recently listed as one of the world’s top 20 most-innovative economies, China is investing heavily in new, sustainable ideas, and making the best use of sophisticated technology for it.
Also read: Made in India, but Modicare owes a lot to China, South Korea and Thailand
Consider Mobike, the first app-based bicycle-sharing platform not just in China but across the world that recently entered the Indian market as well.
Battling high levels of pollution, China aggressively promoted bike-sharing through entrepreneurial interventions like Mobike. The idea caught on, and three years since its launch, Mobike has a presence in over 200 cities across the world.
“The freedom for economic innovation among other things is tremendous in China right now,” the Chinese foreign ministry official said.