5 Popular Apps That Are Actually Chinese

China seems to be everywhere nowadays. Whether it’s making synthetic diamonds more durable than real ones or being the first country to experiment with network speeds 10 times faster than 5G, you’ve likely seen China dominating news headlines globally.

One other area where Chinese companies dominate is the mobile phone app market. Whether it’s on the Google Play Store for Android or the Apple App Store for iOS, users have access to millions of apps on their phones. Apps like Weibo, WeChat, and BiliBili are quite popular in China, but there are plenty of Chinese apps that are loved by users globally. Of the eight most downloaded apps worldwide in 2025, three of them had Chinese companies behind them. This domination was even bigger before AI became popular, as in 2023, four of the five most downloaded apps in the U.S. were Chinese.

These are apps that practically everyone has at least heard of, but may not know were originally Chinese. These include some of the most widely used online shopping platforms in the U.S., popular video-editing programs for phones, and of course, a certain app that pretty much birthed short-form content.

While YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels also exist now, it was TikTok — which was originally called Douyin in China — that popularized the genre of short-form content. With short-form content being as popular as it is nowadays, it’s no surprise that TikTok is one of the most downloaded apps globally.

It’s no secret that TikTok is China-owned, with ByteDance being a popular name, especially due to recent privacy concerns raised by the American government. Due to these concerns, though, the version of TikTok available to users in the U.S. is now American-owned, and the joint venture now in charge of the brand in the U.S. has been issued mandates around user privacy and the algorithm behind the app’s feed.

ByteDance still holds more shares of the American TikTok than any other individual company, however, and TikTok in the U.S. was still directly China-owned until very recently. ByteDance still owns the global TikTok brand as well, and Shou Zhi Chew — the CEO of TikTok who managed its affairs in America even before the new changes — is still a board member for TikTok’s American operations, just working alongside more U.S.-based entities.

There are a lot of video editing programs available to people of all skill levels. These include expensive programs with powerful features that only the most professional editors might use, and also casual apps that you can download for free on your phone.

When it comes to editing videos on your Android or iOS device, one of the most popular free apps — though many of its features are locked behind a paywall — is CapCut. The app is often recommended to novice users, so if you’ve ever tried editing together family videos or your gameplay footage on your phone, you’ve likely seen or heard of it.

What many people don’t know is that the company behind CapCut is Chinese, with CapCut itself originally being called JianYing in China. Furthermore, it’s the same company that’s behind TikTok: ByteDance. This is why TikTok is so heavily incorporated inside the CapCut app, letting you immediately post to TikTok, use your saved audio clips from the platform, and edit short-form TikTok videos with ease.

There’s no shortage of American e-commerce companies. There’s obviously Amazon dominating everything from household items to tech, but the list also includes Walmart, Target, eBay, and many other options. These should be enough to meet all the average user’s needs, making the online shopping industry a fairly tough market to get into. However, Temu has cemented itself as a worthy competitor, despite only starting out in 2022.

This is largely due to the company behind Temu — PDD Holdings, which was founded in China but recently moved its headquarters to Ireland — aggressively marketing cheap rates, free gifts, and high-value referral programs. The Temu slogan of “shop like a millionaire” and its catchy ads are two more reasons why the app has suddenly exploded in popularity, especially with younger people.

Temu is still nowhere near as popular as Amazon in the U.S., however, and there are many concerns over the quality of items you buy. Still, if you want to get better rates and items that you can’t find in Western marketplaces, Temu provides a great alternative.

We’ve talked about Temu already and how the online shopping app from China is rapidly increasing in popularity among U.S. households. Despite being one of the most downloaded apps globally, though, Temu is a relatively recent app, and there’s been a much bigger force competing with Amazon and eBay for at least the past decade.

This multinational corporation is called AliExpress, and it’s part of the Alibaba Group, which dominates the Chinese (and to an extent, global) market in many ways. It owns Taobao and Tmall, the biggest e-commerce stores in China, AliPay, one of the leading Chinese digital finance platforms, and Alibaba.com, which is among the world’s biggest B2B marketplaces for bulk purchases.

AliExpress is the Alibaba Group’s online store for global customers. Where Alibaba.com is for businesses intending to make large inventory purchases and Taobao and Tmall are intended for the Chinese market, AliExpress serves as a way for global consumers to get items cheaper than at other places by buying from Chinese manufacturers.

There are a lot of ways for customers to shop online, and we’ve discussed several of them in this list already. Whether it’s Temu, Amazon, or AliExpress, all more or less do the same thing. One online shopping platform that focuses on apparel and has become synonymous with the term “fast fashion” is Shein, and like many other popular online shopping platforms, it has its origins in China.

This online fashion giant was originally called ZZKKO when it first came out in China all the way back in 2008. It rebranded to the Shein that we know today in 2015, and only really started seeing global traction starting in 2020, following the pandemic.

Unlike many other online retailers, Shein sells its own in-house products, and despite not having any physical stores whatsoever until 2025, competes with popular brands like H&M, Zara, and Forever 21. While the company may have only been a budget Amazon specifically for clothes at one point, it has since become one of the most popular fashion brands out there for the average consumer, even opening its first permanent physical retail store in Paris in 2025.