Top 9 Essential Apps for Your China Travel

Somewhere between the taxi rank and the hotel lobby, most first-time visitors to China figure out that their phone, loaded with every app they’ve ever needed, is basically dead weight. Google Maps won’t load. The driver won’t take cash. WhatsApp has been “connecting” since the plane touched down. None of this is a glitch — it’s how the country works. China’s entire consumer economy moved onto a small set of apps years ago, and almost none of them are the ones you already have installed. The essential apps for China aren’t a nice-to-have for your trip; they’re the actual infrastructure, and getting them running before you land is the single best thing you can do for your first 24 hours here.

Sort Out Your VPN First

Although the following recommended Apps all work in China without the use of a VPN it is nevertheless the one most essential tools you will need while in China. Google, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and most Western map apps sit behind the Great Firewall, and no amount of signal strength gets you around that. It’s not just the obvious social apps, either — Gmail, Google Drive, and a long list of cloud services go dark too.

If you want to stay in contact with friends &family back home, post your China highlights on Instagram or simply check your mails you need a VPN

I’ve run Astrill for years now, mostly because it keeps working even during the periods when Beijing tightens things up around a big political event or anniversary. The part people get wrong: they wait until they’re already in the country to sort this out. Once you’re here, a lot of VPN provider websites are themselves blocked, so you can end up locked out of the very tool that would unlock everything else.

WeChat Runs Everything Else

Calling WeChat (微信, Wēixìn) a messaging app is a bit like calling a Swiss Army knife a bottle opener. For most people here, it’s also their bank, their ID for booking things, their news feed, and increasingly the app they use to check into a doctor’s appointment. As a visitor, the one function that actually changes your day is WeChat Pay.

Foreign Visa and Mastercard now link straight into it — no Chinese bank account, no workaround required, just a settings menu you tap through once. That used to be the single biggest headache for anyone visiting; now it’s barely a step. The exceptions are the places you’d expect: street food carts, some older market vendors, the odd noodle stall that’s never updated anything in its life. Cash still earns its keep there.

Worth knowing too: a huge amount of what museums, train stations, and restaurants do runs through WeChat’s “mini-programs” — small tools that live inside the app itself, no separate download needed, covering everything from buying a ticket to pulling up a menu.

Alipay, WeChat’s Other Half

Alipay (支付宝, Zhīfùbǎo) does roughly the same job as WeChat Pay, and in a fair number of shops, it’s the one they’d rather you use. The app built a feature called Tour Pass specifically with visitors in mind: link a card, cap your spending, and you’re set. Some taxi drivers and chain cafés lean Alipay, some lean WeChat, and there’s no real logic to which — it changes shop to shop.

Rather than guess, just carry both. Link a card to each. If a QR code refuses to scan in one app, open the other. It costs you two minutes of setup at home and saves you the awkward standoff at the register.

Didi Gets You a Ride Without Speaking a Word of Mandarin

Didi (滴滴) is the ride-hailing app, and it’s fully translated into English now — a real change from a few years ago. Type in where you’re going, watch the fare appear before you commit to anything, and let the driver navigate to you and then to your destination. There’s no address to pronounce badly and no meter dispute at the end.

In cities like Chengdu or Hangzhou, it regularly beats flagging a street taxi on both price and patience, especially in the rain, when drivers have a habit of cruising past foreigners standing at the curb. Link a card once and the app handles the rest — you just get out at the other end.

Trip.com for Trains, Hotels, and Flights

For anything involving a booking — trains, hotels, flights — Trip.com is the one built with foreigners in mind. The interface is genuinely English, not machine-translated English, and it takes foreign cards without complaint. High-speed rail tickets attach directly to your passport number, so at the gate you scan the passport itself; there’s no paper ticket to lose. The official rail booking app, 12306, also lets foreigners buy tickets, but it’s Chinese-only and the card verification process is rough going if you don’t read the language.

It’s worth checking hotels there too, before defaulting to a Western booking site. A lot of smaller, genuinely good Chinese hotels never bother listing anywhere else, but they show up on Trip.com with real photos, English reviews, and a normal checkout.

Amap, Not Google Maps

Even running a VPN, Google Maps in China is unreliable — pins land in the wrong district, whole streets are missing, restaurants closed years ago still show as open. Amap (高德地图, sometimes called Gaode Maps) was built for this country specifically, and the difference shows immediately: live traffic that’s actually live, bus routes that match reality, walking directions through subway interchanges that would otherwise eat twenty minutes of your life.

The interface leans Chinese, but you don’t need to read a character to use it. Copy an address from a booking confirmation or a message straight into the search bar instead of typing it out by hand. For hotels and major landmarks, the pinyin spelling alone is usually enough to pull up the right result.

Meituan and Dianping for Finding Something to Eat

Meituan (美团) is the delivery app, and it reaches restaurants that don’t exist anywhere else online — the hot pot place with no sign, the bakery that’s only ever had a folding table out front. Dianping (大众点评) is the review side of the same coin, China’s version of Yelp, and honestly more useful than Google reviews ever were here: more photos, more recent activity, more detail per listing.

Both stay stubbornly Chinese-only, which trips people up at first. In practice, the photos do most of the work — you can order a meal by pointing at pictures alone — and Pleco covers whatever text you actually need translated. Order hot pot delivery to a Chengdu apartment at midnight through Meituan once, and you’ll understand why nobody bothers going without it after that.

Pleco, When You Need to Actually Read Something

Pleco is a dictionary app with a camera built in — point it at a menu or a sign, and the translation overlays directly onto the image. For Chinese specifically, it beats the generic camera-translate feature in most all-purpose translation apps, because it was built for nothing else. It also does handwriting input, so if you can’t type or say a character, you can trace it with a finger and let the app work out what you meant.

The core dictionary works offline too, which matters more than you’d think once you’re on a rural bus route with no signal.

Get Your eSIM Running Before You Land

Every app on this list needs one thing to function at all: data, from the moment you step off the plane. Buying a physical SIM at the arrivals hall means a queue, a passport photocopy, and a form. An eSIM skips all of that — activate it before you board, and your phone is already online when the wheels touch down.

The Order That Actually Matters

None of these apps are hard to install on their own. Doing them in the right order beforehand, though, is what separates a smooth first day from an afternoon spent fighting your phone in a taxi:

1. Install and test your VPN — at home, on wifi you trust.
2. Activate your eSIM a day or two before departure, not at the gate.
3. Set up WeChat and link a foreign card to WeChat Pay.
4. Set up Alipay, switch on Tour Pass, and link a second card.
5. Install Didi, link a card, and do a dry run typing a destination in pinyin or English.
6. Install Amap and save your hotel or apartment address in Chinese as a favorite.
7. Download Pleco and pull the offline dictionary in before you fly.

A Few More, Not Essential But Worth Having

Everything above is what you actually need. These three aren’t required, but they’ve earned a spot on my phone depending on how I’m traveling.

Xiaohongshu (小红书)

Part Instagram, part Pinterest, known outside China these days as RedNote. For “best noodles near me” or “what to do in Chengdu on a rainy afternoon,” it consistently beats travel blogs and review sites, because the posts come from people who were actually there last week, not a listicle from 2019.

Baidu Maps

When Amap comes up empty on a specific route, Baidu Maps sometimes has it. The two pull from different data sets, so keeping both installed costs nothing and occasionally saves you a dead end.

Ele.me (饿了么)

Meituan’s main rival for delivery, tied into the Alibaba ecosystem and usually easiest to pay through Alipay. Smaller cities in particular sometimes have restaurants listed on one and not the other, so it’s worth having both if you’re outside a major hub.

Vocabulary Worth Knowing