Chrome has become the most used web browser in China. As of November 2021, the browser accounted for about 50 percent of the total web traffic in the Chinese market, leading other competitors like Safari and Firefox with a large margin.
There are however some exceptions, that is Google services that still work in China, such a Google Chrome, and Android operative system, even if with some severe limitations (for instance Google Play is blocked).
Baidu is China's largest and most widely used search engine, much like Google in the U.S.
Safari still takes the first place in China's domestic mobile browser market in August 2020, with a market share of 19.7%, a decrease of 0.89% compared with July. Baidu Browser ranked second, down from 17.96% to 17.43% in August.
Google pulled its search engine from China in 2010 because of heavy government internet censorship. Since then, Google has had a difficult relationship with the Chinese market. The end of Google Translate in China marks a further retreat by the U.S. technology giant from the world's second-largest economy.
Countries where access to YouTube is currently blocked
Since then, YouTube has been inaccessible from Mainland China. However, YouTube can still be accessed from Hong Kong, Macau, the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, specific hotels, and by using a VPN.
Leading apps in China 2022, by monthly active users. In June 2022, Tencent's instant messenger service WeChat remained the most popular mobile app in China with around 1.02 billion monthly active users (MAUs). Its older sibling QQ was the seventh placeholder with about 631 million MAUs.
Baidu – China's Answer To Google
It controls more than 75% of the search engine market in the PRC and even brings in some users from other countries, including the U.S. and Japan.
WeChat (or Weixin 微信)
WeChat is one of the most popular free messaging apps in China and provides many features compared to other social messaging apps, such as Facebook Messenger.
Hi, Yes, it should work. When using the internet in other countries the software installed on your phone does not change. Access to certain websites may differ.
In the United States, Google is still the undisputed search king with over 91 percent of the overall market share. But in China, it's all about Baidu. However, while the average American hasn't even heard of Baidu, it's the second-largest search engine in the world.
Since 2014, Gmail has been blocked in China, making it very difficult for anyone to access any Gmail account from the mainland. This makes it near impossible to access the ever-popular Gmail, YouTube, Google Translate, Google Maps, Google Sheets, Google Docs, or the Google search engine from inside China.
Is Instagram blocked in China? Yes, Instagram is blocked in China. It was blocked intermittently starting in 2014 and now it is completely censored. Attempting to access the app from within mainland China will result in an error message saying the feed cannot be refreshed.
Wechat and Weibo are the social media giants most used in China. Each has more than a half-billion active users.
Despite the global dominance of Google as a primary search engine, Russian consumers gave their preference to homegrown Yandex and Mail.ru.
Google was the most popular search engine in Japan as of March 2022, with a market share of more than 76 percent. It was followed by Yahoo!, which accounted for around 16.6 percent of the search engine market.
Google Search is partially blocked in China. Requests from the mainland to Google Search, including Google.com and Google.cn, are automatically redirected to Google.com.hk, the company's Hong Kong servers. Depending on what you search for on the Hong Kong version, the results may or may not be censored while in China.
China has restricted some communications platforms like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp. To stay in touch with your friends and family around the world, you will need to prepare ahead of time. Short for Virtual Private Network, a VPN will help you access these restricted sites even from China.
WeChat has now 1.17 billion monthly active users making it the 5th most popular/used social media platform worldwide. WeChat is called the “Facebook of China” due to the similar functions it has with Facebook.
Weibo is one of the most popular sites in China and is often considered to be Chinese Twitter. Like WeChat, Weibo is another platform brands commonly used for social media marketing in China. As of November 2020, Weibo has had over 520 million monthly active users and 230 million daily active users.
Globally popular streaming services like Spotify are banned in mainland China. The NCAC said that while copyright practices had improved since 2015, when the authority banned unlicensed music streaming and ordered platforms to remove millions of songs, the industry still needed to be further standardized.
Yes, using a VPN is legal in China.
WhatsApp is blocked in China because the Chinese government can't moderate or censor messages that are sent on the app. Travelers to China can work around this by switching to government-approved WhatsApp alternatives and using a VPN.
However, since most North Korean residents have no access to the Internet, China, Russia, and Iran are the only countries where access to Facebook is actively restricted in a wholesale manner, although it is possible to access the site through onion services.