Three updates from China’s app ecosystem this week that actually matter.
WeChat Mini Programs are now a real cross-border business.
At the Weixin Open Class PRO 2026 event in Guangzhou on January 15, Tencent announced that WeChat Mini Programs now reach 100+ countries with tens of millions of overseas MAU. Cross-border visits hit 5+ billion annually in 2025. The most interesting detail? Uber’s Mini Program, launched in July 2025 across Hong Kong and Japan, now operates in 20 countries and 1,000+ cities. About 90% of its users were entirely new to Uber.
The Uber integration works how you’d hope: Chinese travelers hail rides without downloading a separate app or binding a foreign credit card. Payment runs through WeChat Pay. There’s built-in real-time translation between rider and driver. Uber’s APAC team built the Mini Program from scratch, learning WeChat’s development framework as they went. Tencent says they’ve significantly reduced the entry threshold for overseas businesses, offering multilingual support and simplified qualification processes.
This is the playbook. Not porting WeChat itself to foreign markets. Instead, they’re making the Mini Program platform the thing that goes global. WeChat stays in China. Mini Programs travel with Chinese users.
Alipay’s Tap (碰一下) hit 200 million users.
That’s up from 100 million in April 2025, when the feature was 321 days old. The new data comes from September 2025. So roughly 100 million new users in about 5 months. Not bad for a payment method that requires you to tap your phone against a reader instead of scanning a QR code.
The tap is now in 400+ Chinese cities across 5,000+ brands and millions of merchants. 300+ use cases beyond payment: ordering food, opening apartment doors, renting bikes, checking into hotels. Half of users are under 30. Alipay also developed a custom NFC chip with Fudan Microelectronics, with an initial order of over 10 million units. The chip operates from -40 to 85 degrees Celsius. That’s the kind of detail that tells you they’re betting hardware standardization is the bottleneck, not just software.
For comparison: QR code payments took 30 months to reach their first 100 million users in China. Face payments took 15 months. Tap took 321 days. The pattern is accelerating, but tap has a hardware requirement that QR codes don’t. The chip manufacturing scale tells me they think it’s worth it.
Xiaohongshu finally put shopping in the bottom nav bar.
In August 2025, Xiaohongshu added a Market (市集) button as a new first-level tab. This is the app’s real bet on ecommerce. The page is a dual-column feed mixing product notes, product cards, livestreams, and short videos. Unlike Douyin’s Super Value Deals or Kuaishou’s Low Price Specials, Xiaohongshu leads with Market Livestreams, Buyer Showcases, and New Product Launches. They’re not doing the low-price war thing.
Third-party estimates put Xiaohongshu’s 2024 GMV at about 400 billion RMB. Douyin did 3.5 trillion. Taobao/Tmall did 8 trillion. The gap is enormous, but Xiaohongshu does something the others don’t: half its traffic goes to posts from accounts with under 1,000 followers, per VP Xu Lei in April 2025. The platform has no super-head influencers. It’s all mid-tier and small creators. The buyer economy model is real. Dong Jie shifted from weekly livestreams to once a month in 2025, and Teresa Cheung dropped to quarterly. They don’t need to push volume. The platform works best for products that need a story, not a discount.
I’ve been using the new Market tab for a few weeks. It’s better than I expected for discovering weird niche stuff. But the checkout experience still redirects you in ways that feel half-baked. The infrastructure gap with Douyin and Taobao is real. Logistics, seller tools, return policies. They’re working on it, but working on it and having it are different things.
One more thing: the mini-program platform landscape just reshuffled. QuestMobile’s mid-2025 report shows the new top three are now WeChat, Alipay (654 million MAU), and Douyin (283 million MAU). Baidu got pushed out. Douyin’s mini-program growth comes mostly from video (62% of top 100) and games (28%). In 2024, Douyin’s mini-game DAU doubled, revenue grew 130%, and prepaid users jumped 320%. Baidu’s problem is that search-driven mini-programs don’t work well in a world where content is supposed to be immersive and contextual.
I wish Xiaohongshu would add a proper shopping cart section instead of making me scroll through the feed to find what I was looking at. But that’s probably next quarter.