Here’s 2 cents for people unfamiliar with CHN e-commerce companies, or any CHN online businesses in general, from someone who frequently spends time there:
Let’s imagine, that Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Twitter, Booking…stops providing support for desktop pages, and kinda force you to use their iOS or Android apps if you wanna use their full services. Can you imagine that?
That is exactly what’s happening with CHN internet. Or shall we say intranet, given their level of blockades and censorship.
We all know the majority of online businesses make the majority of $$$ (¥¥¥) by selling user data / providing targeted ad services. The thing with desktop vs. mobile app is that it’s so much easier for them to harvest so much more and so much deeper data from mobile apps than from desktop pages, so some Chinese online businesses only keep a half-hearted skeleton crew to run their desktop pages, while others provide nothing but a QR code for mobile app download if you try to access from a computer.
Even worse, it’s actually in CHN gov’s best (short term) interest to allow top companies (Alibaba, parent company of Aliexpress; Tencent, parent company of WeChat, etc) to gather as much and as detailed user data as possible, since all entities are required by law to hand over whatever data the gov asks for. Thus, CHN gov is more than reluctant to carry out any regulations in terms of domestic privacy protection. However, they’re extremely sensitive when it comes to transferring / storing data abroad. Word is Tencent will very soon be fined a record amount, somewhere around 1.5 - 3 billion USD equivalence, for transferring user data abroad “without permission”.
In CHN, privacy protection is a pathetic joke that CHN people themselves laugh about all the time. It’s one of their own “Soviet jokes”.
I’m not praising or judging anything here. I’m just stating a fact.