From the consumer side there's a totally different ecosystem of apps (or A-P-Ps as everyone calls them) used for almost everything. I travelled to China last year for work and would have been completely stranded without the person our supplier assigned to us to look after us.

Cash is basically not used, with everyone using either WeChat or Ali payments via mobile apps (which as far as we could tell you can't activate without a Chinese bank account). Even the person hawking souvenirs in the the queue at the great wall only accepted mobile payments, the only place that would accept a western card was one particular Xiaomi store.

On the second day we were there we decided to buy a coffee near the office before going in, only to be thwarted by the fact you could only order via a mobile app. The person working there literally could not accept an order manually via the till, and we couldn't install the app to place one because it was only available on the Chinese version of the app stores. After that we mostly just accepted the fact we weren't going to be able to function independently.