It was the the largest browsers in Indonesia and India, at least in part because it's marketed as saving $$ on data by blocking calls to download ads and other scripts[1][2].

[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2130205/alibabas-uc-mobile... [2]https://marketingland.com/alibabas-uc-browser-beating-google...

Sure! I have it on my Dell Venue Pro running Windows Phone 7. There's dozens of us.

Sure, lots of people install custom browsers because they don't like the standard ones, myself included. Fennec (Firefox but from f-droid) is super slow, Chrome is not an option for privacy, but Lightning[1] is fast and has most of the features I want so that's what I use at the moment. It might be vulnerable for something, but I'm taking my chances with some lesser-known browser versus having the pain of a super slow browser all the time. This is also one of the reasons I don't have a banking app installed or have ssh keys on my phone or something: my phone is just not as trusted as my laptop.

I remember that UC is one of the ones I looked at, probably even installed to try it out.

Edit: sibling comments mention popularity in India or Asia, but I'm from the Netherlands. My brother also has a habit of finding custom things (independently from me), sometimes quite questionable apps... it's not just asians that install non-google apps.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/acr.browser.lightning/

I think that I have read that it is really famous in India.

According to Google Play [1] it has >500M installs and about 20M reviews.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.UCMobile.i...

I see strange JS error reports from this browser sometimes

Yes. A company I worked for had a large Indian userbase who almost exclusively used it.

Yes, since new Android phones only have Chrome which is very heavy. UC Browser has a reputation of being lean, so it's widely used in poor countries.

It's popular in Asia.