How a decade of smartphone apps changed the way people live in China

This article is co-written by Minghe Hu.

When finance industry employee Ringo Li relocated back to Beijing from Tokyo in 2010, he brought along his first smartphone – an iPhone 3G. Although one of the most advanced handsets available at the time, it was mainly used for text messages and phone calls and occasional internet surfing where Wi-Fi was available.

Life was mostly offline back then. Li would go to restaurants to order food, pay bills with cash, and hailed a taxi with an outstretched arm standing on the roadside.

Fast forward 10 years and Li’s life has completely changed. No longer in finance, he communicates via WeChat and uses apps on his iPhone XS to order food, hail taxis, pay bills, and shop.

Photo credit: 123RF

Most of the apps that permeate the daily life of Li and hundreds of millions of other Chinese had their beginnings at the start of the decade.

Launched in 2011, WeChat started out as a messaging app like WhatsApp and Line but quickly grew into a super app, offering additional functions like payments, and is today used by 1.15 billion Chinese.

Food delivery giant Meituan was founded in 2010 as a Groupon-like group-buying website before merging with rival Dianping in 2015 to create China’s largest lifestyle platform.

The mobile version of Alibaba Group’s Taobao ecommerce platform was also launched by 2010. Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

Over the past decade, “China has rapidly evolved from a copier to an innovator,” said Michael McLaughlin, a research analyst at the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

In one important way, China had a head start in the age of apps because the country quickly leapfrogged personal computer technology and quickly moved to mobile devices. By 2012, the number of mobile internet users outnumbered those accessing the web via computers. The mobile internet population grew fivefold within 10 years, reaching more than 847 million by June 2019, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

The WeChat success story is testament to how the 2010s will be remembered as the decade that saw a drastic change in how Chinese make friends and consume information.

And in Ringo Li’s case, it changed his life. In 2014, he began blogging on his WeChat public account, writing about mysterious cases and unconventional figures, such as the sinking of the MV Sewol and Japanese doomsday cult group Aum Shinrikyo.

What started out as a personal interest grew beyond expectations, and he accumulated more than 500,000 followers through the years. The income from ads and tips from WeChat alone generated a monthly income of tens of thousands of yuan.