The Chinese apps hiding in plain sight on your phone
TikTok gets all the attention, but Chinese-owned apps and gadgets are probably all over your phone already. Here’s how to find them, and when you should actually worry.
Reviewed, edited and approved by Editor-in-chief Daniel Sköld · Updated 23 October 2026
Contents
Ask most people to name a Chinese app and they’ll say TikTok, probably with a slight shudder. Fair enough. Look a bit harder, though, and the list gets longer and odder. It might include the video editor your nephew recommended, the app that runs your £25 smart plug, the robot vacuum that maps your living room and the game your wife plays on the train.
None of this is secret, exactly. It just isn’t advertised. So here is how to work out what on your phone has roots in China, why the ownership matters more for some apps than others, and what you can sensibly do about it without throwing your handset in the canal.
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Which popular apps are actually Chinese-owned?
The obvious one first. TikTok belongs to ByteDance, a Beijing-founded company. ByteDance also makes CapCut, the free video editor that sits on millions of phones whose owners have never opened TikTok in their lives.
Then there’s shopping. Temu, the app that sells you a garden hose for the price of a sandwich, is owned by PDD Holdings. That company now has its headquarters in Dublin, but it grew out of the Chinese shopping giant Pinduoduo. Shein was founded in China and later moved its base to Singapore. AliExpress is part of Alibaba. Moving the head office tends to change the postal address more than the culture.
Games are where most people get caught out. The Chinese tech group Tencent owns Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends, and a majority stake in Supercell, which makes Clash of Clans. It also holds a large minority stake in Epic Games, the people behind Fortnite. Nothing on the loading screen tells you any of this.
And in early 2025 DeepSeek, a Chinese AI chatbot, shot to the top of the app charts almost overnight. Plenty of people installed it because it was free and clever, without ever opening the privacy policy, which explains that your data is stored on servers in China.
The gadgets that bring their own apps
Your hardware matters too. Many of the cheapest smart plugs, bulbs and cameras on Amazon are built on platforms from Chinese suppliers and run through generic apps such as Smart Life. Robot vacuums from Roborock and Ecovacs, Eufy cameras and doorbells (made by Anker), DJI drones, and phones from Xiaomi, Oppo, OnePlus, Honor and Realme all come from Chinese companies. So do TVs from Hisense and TCL.
A lot of this kit is very good, and often better value than the big Western names. But every one of these devices comes with an app, an account and, usually, a cloud service. A robot vacuum with a camera and a floor plan of your house knows a fair bit more about you than a game of Clash of Clans does.
Why does it matter if an app is Chinese?
Let’s be honest about this. American apps hoover up enormous amounts of data too. Meta and Google know more about most of us than our GPs do. If your worry is data collection in general, China isn’t the only problem.
The difference is the law that sits behind the company. China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law says organisations must support and co-operate with state intelligence work. Western security officials take that to mean a Chinese firm could be made to hand over data with little room to refuse, and nobody outside would find out. The companies involved, TikTok among them, say firmly that they don’t share user data with the Chinese government. You’re left weighing a corporate promise against a legal obligation.
The question isn’t whether an app collects your data. They all do. It’s who could be made to hand it over, and whether you’d ever know.
The UK government has made its own call on this, though only for its own devices. In March 2023 the Cabinet Office banned TikTok on government corporate phones after a review by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Britain’s cyber defence agency, part of GCHQ. Oliver Dowden, the minister in charge, called it a prudent and proportionate step. The ban specifically didn’t cover ministers’ and civil servants’ personal phones or the general public. People were simply told to read each platform’s data policies before installing it.
Under UK GDPR, the data protection law Britain kept after Brexit, any company offering services to people in the UK has to follow the rules wherever its head office is. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) can and does enforce them. In 2023 it fined TikTok £12.7 million for misusing children’s data. So you do have legal protections. They just work better against a firm with a London office than against a server in Shenzhen.
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How do I check who made an app on my phone?
It takes two minutes. On an iPhone, open the app’s page in the App Store and scroll down. You’ll see the developer’s name and an App Privacy section listing what data it collects and whether that data is linked to you. On Android, the Google Play listing shows the developer and a Data safety section that does the same job. If the developer name means nothing to you, search for it. A company you’ve never heard of, with an address in Singapore or the Cayman Islands, is worth a second look.
Next, check what you’ve actually let each app do. On an iPhone, go to Settings, then Privacy & Security, and work through Location Services, Contacts, Photos, Microphone and Camera. On most Android phones, look for the Permission manager under the Security or Privacy settings. The exact menu varies by manufacturer, which is very Android.
Ask yourself a simple question for each app: why does it need this? A shopping app doesn’t need your contacts. A torch app doesn’t need your location. A video editor needs your photos, but not every photo you’ve taken since 2014. Both iPhone and Android now let you share selected photos only, and give an approximate location instead of a precise one.
So should you delete them?
Not necessarily. It depends on what’s on the phone and what you do with it.
If you work in government, defence, critical infrastructure or anywhere with sensitive commercial information, keep anything you’re unsure about off the phone you use for work. Your employer may already insist on it. The same goes for anyone whose phone holds more than holiday photos and the WhatsApp group from the pub.
For everyone else, it’s a judgement call. Playing Clash of Clans won’t give Beijing your bank details. Uploading confidential documents to a free AI chatbot whose servers are in China is a different matter. Treat any chatbot, wherever it’s from, as a stranger with a very good memory.
With smart home kit, stick to brands that promise security updates for a stated period and let you use the device without handing over more than an email address. Change the default passwords, keep the firmware (the device’s built-in software) up to date, and think twice before putting a cheap camera from an unknown brand in the bedroom.
And clear out the apps you don’t use. Each app you’ve forgotten about is still a little data tap you left running.
In short
Chinese-owned apps go well beyond TikTok: CapCut, Temu, Shein, AliExpress, DeepSeek, big-name games owned by Tencent and the apps that run a great deal of cheap smart home kit. Being Chinese-owned doesn’t make an app malicious, but Chinese law could force the company to hand over data, which is why the UK government banned TikTok on its own devices in 2023. Check the developer and privacy labels in the app store, cut back permissions to what each app actually needs, and keep anything sensitive well away from apps you don’t trust.
Alex Innes explains technology for men 45 and over who have seen every gadget since the ZX Spectrum and are not easily impressed. AI and ChatGPT, phones, cars, the smart home, the subscriptions worth keeping and staying safe online – what it does, whether it's worth the money, and whether you need it at all.
One of Midcent's writers. Spotted something? Write to alex@midcent.uk.
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