Bubble in China

Hi, I am looking to launch my app in China.

Two quick questions.

  1. Is bubble planning on supporting Chinese social logins in the future?

  2. Does bubble support services like Cloudflare’s offering in mainland China (or Baidu’s!) that can boost page load speed for websites hosted outside the mainland?

Thanks!

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Hello,

Sorry for taking some time to answer that one. I have a strong personal connection with China (I lived there for more than 3 years, my parents met in BJ in 78, father went to Taida, etc…) so I’d love Bubble to do things and be more visible in China :slight_smile:

Now, being based in the US doesn’t help to get things started, but we could experiment. The main concern I have right now is speed given the firewall. We’re on AWS, not Cloudflare, so using their offering in China is unfortunately not a super easy thing to do (and my understanding is that you need a local registration to make it work no? I may be wrong, let me know if I am).

To your specific questions about social logins, we could add that, it’s not harder than adding Facebook’s or Google’s. Which service do you have in mind? To be honest though, before we start spending quite some time on feature development for China, I want to know who Bubble is working there. Have you tested it extensively?

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Hey Emmanuel.

Thanks for getting back to me - and great to find someone else keyed into the Chinese market.

You do indeed need an ICP license to use cloudflare’s services in China, which is a bridge I intend to cross at a later date. The main thing for me at the moment is to try and put something together which I can test (which your site is absolutely perfect for by the way).

I was thinking Sina Weibo or QQ for prevalence and relevance to my target market.

To be honest, I would hold off on developing these features on my account - I will try and test something in the coming weeks and then see what performance is like. It may be better off to try HK/SG/JP hosting to get as close as possible before the effects of the firewall.

Many thanks for taking the time to get back to me!

James

Are you in Beijing? A workshop is being organized there on May 21, if you want some details I can put you in touch with the organizer.

I’m myself will be in HK and TPE end of May, if you’re around i’d be happy to meet!

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Just back actually - but what is the workshop? Would be interested to hear what other peoples’ milage is using it out there.

It’s a workshop for BJ based entrepreneurs. It’s a user’s initiative, so I don’t have much more details

As someone that is looking to use Bubble in China as well, I can say the main thing we run into is sites that host assets/scripts, etc on google servers. Also usually google fonts cause issues as well as google analytics. Facebook, twitter, etc buttons with scripts pointing back to those respective domains are generally blocked as well and will have to timeout before a page will finish loading.

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btw, QIHOO 360 has mirrors of google fonts/scripts/library mirrored in China and you can use the alternate domain to get the same result. http://libs.useso.com/

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Do you guys know about a service that lets us test from the US how the site works in China?

Afraid I am little help. We had some stuff running on MS Azure in China (running in 21Vianet data centers), but to even create an account you need a China resident ID number, not counting a Chinese ICP License for a web site.

Yeah I had heard about the qihoo 360 mirror - just part of what I was trying to get away from using buffer.

http://www.youziku.com/ is the best Chinese web font place I’ve found so far as well if you are having trouble with google fonts.

Tbh most sites in China don’t bother specifying a body text font anyway as support is so patchy - they just let each browser fall back to the system font.

I haven’t heard of a good testing service, but would be very interested to hear about one if you find something!

Any China updates? By the way, I’ve noticed some rather significant improvements on how Bubble works in China over the past year.

Latency is probably the biggest issue for me with development.

Hi I’m using bubble in Hong Kong and its working fine for me over the last year.

I have plans to take my app into China also.

I’m excited to read this thread.

We do not officially support China because of the firewall, but some users on dedicated plans have seen good results, either by locating their servers in Tokyo or using a special CDN.

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Hi Emmanuel

Presently I’m still on a learning curve with bubble and thoroughly enjoying it. I’m hoping to have my app finish and built early next year.

I plan to upgrade to the dedicated plan at the start of next year then I will have some time to look at best play place host the application.

I am not sure what CDN is ?

Stripe just announced support for Chinese payment providers Alipay and WeChat (beta). This is great news as they are the defacto payment methods for Chinese consumers.

I think China is not as big of a deal as some think. I suggest to tap Japan Korea Singapore HK and then China mainland.

Plus in China app development is controled by Tensent and Ali group + Chinese gov. How will they react to bubble?

Also what does going to China means? Its a digital service. Any chinese with VPN can access it. Easier that bothering with Chinese regulation.

As to test rent ali cloud server access from there and test.

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Am using it in China with no problems

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Gentlemen, bubble works in china very well. am developing an app using bubble and i have had no issues with latency issues etc or the GFW. am using baidu and bing maps very well next week should integrate wechat payments.

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Thanks Eddie

Whereabouts are you based?

This is great to hear! I’m looking at selling my application into China next year.

I’m in Hong Kong!