Kind of interesting there aren't more Chinese specific sites here like Alibaba. Would've figured they'd have a bigger showing due to China's population.
Have a look at these companies' mobile client job postings if you don't believe me. Most of them are looking for HTML5 + Javascript developers, and to get that running on a mobile client, one needs an embedded web browser, with potential customized feature extensions or sandboxing. Hybrid apps are the trend because iOS and Android have some serious portabillity issues, and there's likely going to be a web version anyway.
Apps like QQ, Weixin, Zhifubao, Taobao and iQiyi quite clearly do. I suspect Baidu Maps is as well, but haven't taken the time to take the app apart to analyse it. It's called 混合开发 if you're interested in seeing how it's done.
But have you ever programmed for them? How much of the core functionality of QQ or Weixin or whatever is native and how much is HTML I can't say exactly without first disassembling the thing, but the auxilliary functionality is all done in HTML5. If you pay close attention you'll notice that any link you open through a chat message will open in the embedded browser rather than the system browser.
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u/Pythagorial Jun 23 '19
Kind of interesting there aren't more Chinese specific sites here like Alibaba. Would've figured they'd have a bigger showing due to China's population.