# mobile apps

Tiny Fonts, Big Fees: How Mobile Apps Are Quietly Draining China’s Elderly of Pensions

A wave of mobile apps in China is using deceptive design and opaque billing to extract small, repeated payments from elderly users, often hiding the true price behind small, pale fonts, “free” insurance pitches and automatic subscription switches. Legal and platform gaps — including weak pre-listing reviews, disputed intermediary liability and limited refund pathways through app stores — make recovery difficult and keep these practices profitable.