Data from Cheetah Global Lab reinforces that WeChat IS the Chinese internet

Cheetah Global Lab and Chinese tech portal 36kr have just released the 2016 App Ranking. We will have  more coverage of the report in subsequent posts, but I’d  like to highlight the first ranking to appear in the report:

The first thing that popped out to me was WeChat’s 80% weekly active penetration rate and 166.9 weekly opens per capita (that’s an average of almost 24 opens per day per user). Granted these numbers are only coming from Android users, but Android accounts for more almost 83% of the total market, according to some estimates.

WeChat is continually compared to Facebook. However, AOL might be a better comparison. While booking a cab through Didi over the weekend, my father-in-law remarked, “What’s Didi? I just use WeChat to book a cab.” The implication, of course, is that he almost never has to exit WeChat to get something done in the physical world.

With mini-apps (or mini-programs, whatever your inclination) and an increasingly integrated O2O offering, WeChat is poised to become the main entry point into anything internet powered for a majority of China.