What I was prepared for:

When planning a move to China, we all think of the obvious things we will lose the ability to use; All Google products, Facebook, Whats App, Twitter, Instagram, etc. I have known people who have purchased VPNs so that they could continue using those services, but I am not one of those people.

What I did not expect:

Distance issues

The biggest issue I have ran into has been the physical distance between China and the Western world. The servers of the websites and services that I use are so far away from me that they are either extremely slow or the connection times out.

The most annoying case I have had of this was when I was trying to inform my student loan provider that I have joined the Peace Corps by uploading a document to their site. The issue was that I could not get to that portion of their site because it kept timing out.

Updating Apps

Before leaving the US, I went in search of a secure messaging app that I could use while abroad. I settled upon Signal, which is an amazing app. I downloading it and made it my default messaging app.

After living in China for a few months, the app stopped working because my version of the app was out of date. In my mind, out of date means insecure so I understand and applaud them for disabling my old version of the Signal app.

However, I have no means of updating the app while in China. I cannot use the Google Play store and the Chinese app store that I am using does not have Signal. As a result, I have been forced to give up on using Signal while in China.