Dianping: Discover Good Places

This app is a must for living in China. It becomes a habit to check reviews before making any dining/purchase decisions. It also helps me to find a place for almost anything. Watching pets/parties/food videos shared by other people is a good time killer when I don’t have time to enjoy life.

It’s sharing feature limits the output, making it difficult to truly share 1:1 with someone. For example, if you share it in WeChat, it opens up in 小程序 which is not a 1:1 mapping of the info (operating hours are not shown); if you share it as a link, it will almost always require verification. For a social app, this feature of supporting co-browsing style exploration should be tablestake, yet for some business driven reason, the experience is very fragmented, making it unusable for a scenario where a group may want to explore and decide on a certain option.

Recommended by my friend, I installed it and found it offered too many choices for your daily spending, great fun and good discount, including free charges for your well planned food, hotel or experience. I got used to check in this app before I move to consume, online order helped me a lot.