UC Browser: Founder, Country, Company Details Of Chinese Browser

UC Browser is a web browser developed by the Chinese mobile internet company UCWeb, which is owned by Alibaba Group. It is quite popular all over the world and highly used in the fast-growing markets such as India and Indonesia. It is the flagship product of UCWeb Inc. while the others include UC News, search, etc.

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UCWeb was initially founded in 2004 as a mobile browser maker and forayed into other categories such as mobile gaming, mobile search, reading, etc. in recent years. The UC Browser is the most popular product from the company with a major chunk of the market share. This mobile browser acclaimed popularity and is widely used by many as it comes with features such as fast page load speeds and lesser data consumption.

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Initially, it was launched as a J2ME-only application and is available on a slew of platforms such as Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Symbian and others. As of last year, it was announced as the 8th most downloaded mobile app of the previous decade.

UC Browser Company Details

In 2014, UCWeb and Alibaba Group announced the formation of a joint venture named Shenma Inc. It offers a mobile-only search engine in China. A few months into the partnership, UCWeb was acquired by Alibaba Group. This acquisition marks the largest Chinese internet merger deal that formed the Alibaba UC mobile business group.

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Following the same, Yu Yongfu, the CEO of UCWeb since 2006 joined Alibaba UC mobile business group to handle search, browser, app store, mobile gaming, location-based service, and mobile reader operations.

UC Browser Partnerships

UCWeb customized the UC Browser for the Indian Vodafone customers in May 2013. Later, it announced a partnership with Trend Micro and an agreement was formed between both companies to provide safety assessments in the mobile browser. The same year, Gameloft licensed UCWeb to sell its products. Furthermore, the company started contributing to the mobile internet revolution in India in collaboration with Colors TV in 2015. It worked with the vision to offer digitized entertainment and make use of its browser in content aggregation and offer quality content to users.

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What Holds For Its Future In India

UC Browser is one of the leading mobile browsers in India. However, during the 2020 China-India clash, the National Security Council has recommended that UC Browser and other apps based in China or owned by Chinese companies have to be blocked due to cybersecurity concerns. We need to wait for further announcement to know what holds for the future of UC Browser in India.

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