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Kuaishou & Kwai explained

What Is Kwai? The International App from Kuaishou

Kwai is Kuaishou Technology's short-video app for outside China. Who owns it, which countries it runs in, and how it differs from Kuaishou in China.

Ishtiaq Turi Ishtiaq Turi Former Trust & Safety and data quality specialist at Kuaishou Technology
Updated 5 min read

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Kwai is the short-video app that Kuaishou Technology runs outside mainland China. Same company as Kuaishou, different app: separate accounts, separate videos, separate links. A video on one does not appear on the other.

I worked at Kuaishou Technology in Trust & Safety before building this site. This page answers the four things people actually search for — who owns Kwai, whether it is Chinese, where it is used, and how it relates to Kuaishou and Snack Video — with a source for each.

Who owns Kwai

Kuaishou Technology, the Hong Kong-listed company behind Kuaishou. On Apple’s App Store, Kwai is published by JOYO TECHNOLOGY PTE. LTD., a Singapore-registered entity. That publisher name is the thing most people trip over: you search “who owns Kwai”, find a Singapore company on the app listing, and conclude it is a Singaporean app. It is not. The parent is Kuaishou Technology, listed in Hong Kong under ticker 1024.

Is Kwai a Chinese app?

Yes, in the sense that matters: it is owned by a Chinese company. It is run as a separate international business from the Chinese app, with its own content library, its own moderation and its own country-by-country operations, but the ownership is not in question and the company does not present it as anything else.

What that means for you depends entirely on what you are asking. If the question is “will I see Chinese videos”, no — your feed is built from the market you are in. If the question is about data and permissions, that is a longer answer than this page should give, and it deserves its own.

Where Kwai is actually used

Kwai’s centre of gravity is Brazil, by a wide margin. Kuaishou’s own 2025 results call Brazil “our key market for overseas development”, and in December 2025 the company told Caixin — citing third-party data — that Kwai had 60 million monthly active users in Brazil, close to a third of the population, spending more than 75 minutes a day in the app. Kwai has been in the country since the late 2010s; Caixin described it as eight years as of late 2025.

The rest of the international business is much smaller than the Chinese one. For scale:

2025 revenue
Kuaishou Technology, totalRMB 142.8 billion
Overseas segment (Kwai and Snack Video)RMB 5.1 billion

The overseas segment’s operating loss narrowed to RMB 76 million in 2025, from RMB 934 million the year before — so it is close to breaking even, but it is roughly 3.5% of the company by revenue.

Kwai, Snack Video and the India ban

In India, Pakistan and Indonesia, Kuaishou Technology’s app has run under the name Snack Video rather than Kwai. They are sibling apps from the same company, not the same app with a different icon.

In June 2020, the Indian government banned Kwai along with 58 other Chinese apps, citing data and privacy concerns — the same action that removed TikTok from India. Snack Video was later banned there too. If you are in India and looking for Kwai, that history is why you cannot find it.

This site’s tool does not support Snack Video links. It accepts Kuaishou and Kwai links only. That is a limitation, not an oversight, and I would rather say so here than let you find out after pasting.

Transparency reporting

Kuaishou’s international business published its first transparency report in March 2022, covering July to December 2021 for Kwai and SnackVideo, and reporting more than 12 million videos removed in that half-year. A second report followed in September 2022, covering January to June 2022, with 8,205,948 videos removed worldwide for breaching community guidelines or terms of service, plus sections on election integrity and self-harm and a central portal for law-enforcement requests.

The company said at the time that it intended to publish every six months. I have not been able to find a more recent global edition, so treat the 2022 reports as the last ones I can point you to rather than as a current picture.

How Kwai differs from Kuaishou when you save a video

KuaishouKwai
Who it is forMainland ChinaOutside China
App languageChineseFollows your country
Typical share linkv.kuaishou.com/...k.kwai.com/p/...
Video file in my testsMP4 (H.264), sometimes a smaller H.265 copy tooOne MP4 (H.264)
Cover imageUsually JPGUsually WebP
Separate soundtrackYes, as M4A, when the post lists oneNo
Error when it failsUsually says why — private, under reviewShows the logged-out home page instead

That last row causes more confusion than anything else on this page. When a Kwai video is deleted, private or blocked in your region, Kwai serves logged-out visitors its general home page, so all three failures look identical from outside. The troubleshooting guide covers how to tell them apart.

Saving a Kwai video

Tap Share, then Copy link, and paste what you get into the Kwai video downloader. No account, no app install. The step-by-step, including what each menu label looks like in different app languages, is in how to download Kwai videos.

Sources