UCWeb was founded in 2004 in Guangzhou by He Xiaopeng and Liang Jie, and has been wholly owned by Alibaba Group since 2014. Its UC Browser compressed pages for slow connections and became the leading mobile browser in India and Indonesia. It also carries a documented privacy record: Citizen Lab found in 2015 that it transmitted user data and search queries insecurely, and India banned the app in 2020.
