ChinApps

Arriving in Mainland China? Almost nothing on your phone behaves the way you expect, and the things that catch people out are rarely the things they planned for.
ChinApps is a written guide for first-time visitors. It explains how paying, getting around and eating actually work on the ground — and, just as importantly, what has to be sorted out before you get on the plane.

SIX GUIDES

Written to be read, not skimmed:

• Before You Fly — the things that are genuinely hard to fix once you have landed
• Getting Online — data that works from the moment you arrive
• Paying for Things — how a cashless country works when your card is foreign
• Getting Around — the metro, taxis, and why your usual map is quietly wrong here
• Eating — ordering from a QR code, and saying what you cannot eat
• If Something Goes Wrong — illness, lost things, and getting help without the language

These are not lists. They explain why Chinese maps are offset from real GPS, why a payment refused by one wallet often goes through on the other, why your name must match your passport exactly, and what to do when a stallholder points at a laminated square taped to the counter.

A TRIP PLAN WITH REAL TIMINGS

Set your departure date and ChinApps works backwards from it. Railway identity verification genuinely takes days and may need a station counter, so it appears two weeks out. Registering a messaging account is far easier while you are still near someone who can verify you, so that comes early too.

Optional reminders arrive on the day each thing should be done. They are scheduled by your own phone and nothing is sent anywhere.

AN OFFLINE PHRASEBOOK

Forty phrases for the situations that actually arise — paying, giving a driver an address, declaring a food allergy, asking for a pharmacy — each with characters, pinyin and spoken Mandarin.

It works with no signal at all, which is exactly when you need it: underground, in a taxi, in a restaurant with no menu. Allergy phrases are written to be shown to kitchen staff rather than spoken, because that works better.

THE ADDRESS CARD

Save your hotel address in Chinese characters and show it full screen, at full brightness, to a taxi driver. Showing written characters works where saying the name does not. It is the simplest thing in the app and probably the most useful.

HONEST NOTES ON THE APPS YOU WILL NEED

The guides name the apps that matter, and each one has a short reference page covering what it demands of you: whether it takes a foreign Visa or Mastercard, whether it needs a Chinese phone number, how much English you will actually find, and what to do first.

Several of these apps are not distributed through Google Play at all. Where that is the case ChinApps says so plainly and points you at the app maker's own site, rather than sending you to a page that does not exist.

NO ACCOUNT, NO TRACKING

No sign-up, no login, no analytics, no ads. Nothing you do leaves your phone. ChinApps is free.