Over 90 percent of Chinese Net users are surfing the Net with smartphones, while 448 million users shop online, according to an official report released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) on Wednesday.
China had 710 million Internet users as of June, accounting for 51.7 percent of its total population, exceeding the global average by 3.1 percent. About 21.3 million people were new Web users in the first half of 2016, an increase of 1.3 percent compared with figures from the end of 2015, the report said.
The number of people surfing the Internet via smartphones reached 656 million, or about 92.5 percent of Internet users, the report said.
The number of users of food take-out apps rose over 40 percent in the first six months of 2016 to over 149 million. Car-hailing apps had 159 million mobile users as of June.
The report noted that 191 million people - roughly 27 percent of Internet users - were from rural areas, marking a huge gap of 35.6 percent in Internet penetration between urban and rural areas.
On average, Web users spent 3.8 hours per day on the Internet, a slight increase over 2015.
According to the report, almost 92 percent of mobile Internet users in China use instant messaging apps, and almost 80 percent use news apps. Mobile search, online payment systems and online music and video were among the most popular mobile applications.
News applications had 564 million users in 2015, up by 8.8 percent, year-on-year. The increase resulted from many applications' adoption of personalized news feeds and the issuance of regulations that made online news more credible, CNNIC Deputy Director Liu Bing said in January.
