About Moji Weather

Moji Weather

Moji Weather (Chinese: 墨迹天气, Moji Tianqi), operated by Beijing Moji Fengyun Technology Co., Ltd., is China's leading consumer weather information service. Launched in 2010, it grew from a mobile weather application into a comprehensive meteorological service platform: a mass-market app used by hundreds of millions of people, and a professional data business selling weather intelligence to aviation, transport, logistics, agriculture, insurance and other weather-sensitive industries. Its name — 墨迹, literally "ink traces" — became so familiar in China that "Moji Weather" functioned for years as a near-generic term for checking the forecast on a phone.

Launch and early growth

Company and press accounts date the service's launch to 2010, with the platform operated by Beijing Moji Fengyun Technology. An Alibaba Cloud history of the app records its earliest versions slightly earlier in experimental form — a Symbian ("Saipan") version in May 2009, the Android version in 2010 and the iOS version in 2011 — consistent with a 2010 formal launch as smartphones replaced feature phones in China. The timing was ideal: weather is one of the highest-frequency information needs on a mobile device, and Moji was positioned before most competitors as Chinese users adopted app-based services.

Growth was rapid. The same industry history records that by 2013 Moji had entered what it calls the "billion-user club" conversation alongside Weibo, WeChat and other leading apps, with around 330 million users at that time. Alibaba was among its backers, as Caixin noted in its later coverage of the company. A headquarters team that numbered just over a hundred people in the mid-2010s supported a user base in the hundreds of millions — a ratio typical of China's platform-era consumer software.

Scale of the consumer platform

The user figures Moji reports have grown across successive disclosures. This directory's source material records around 650 million global users and roughly 147 million monthly active users by 2020. The company's international launch materials in 2024 put the cumulative figure at 700 million users served worldwide with average monthly active users as high as 160 million. Both sets of figures are company-reported, but their consistency in order of magnitude across years and sources establishes the essential fact: Moji is one of the largest weather audiences assembled by any service anywhere, built primarily on the Chinese market.

The service's technical promise to those users is precision: global weather queries at any latitude and longitude, with minute-level and kilometre-level forecast granularity, in the company's description. Moji states that it was among the first to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to meteorological forecasting to improve accuracy, cooperating with professional meteorological organisations at home and abroad and accumulating first-hand meteorological data covering the world.

What the app provides

For consumers, Moji Weather is a forecasting and daily-life decision service: current conditions, short- and long-range forecasts, severe-weather awareness and lifestyle-oriented weather guidance for any location. The platform's positioning — in its international launch phrase, providing "professional weather forecasting and decision-making guidance" — frames weather not as raw data but as decisions: whether to travel, what to wear, how to plan around rain, heat, cold and storms. Its minute-level precipitation and kilometre-level grid forecasts target exactly the questions phone users ask most often: will it rain here, and when.

The consumer platform also served as the data and brand foundation for everything else the company built. A user base checking the weather daily generates both the engagement and the market presence that make a professional weather-data business credible to enterprise buyers.

Professional and industry services

Moji's second business sells professional weather data and decision services to industries whose operations are weather-exposed. The sectors named in its directory record are aviation, highways, logistics, agriculture and insurance, among others. The logic is uniform across them: an airline or airport planning around convective weather, a highway operator anticipating ice or fog, a logistics company routing around storms, a farm business timing planting and spraying, and an insurer pricing or responding to weather risk all need forecasts translated into operational thresholds, not just temperatures on a screen.

In the mid-2020s the company launched an aviation meteorology platform, applying its forecasting stack to flight operations specifically — a notable step because aviation weather is among the most demanding and regulated segments of applied meteorology. The professional business reframes Moji from an advertising-supported consumer app into a meteorological information agency serving industry, which is the basis of its classification in this directory.

The listing attempt and regulatory scrutiny

Moji's corporate history includes a prominent failed listing. Caixin Global reported in October 2019 that the operator of one of China's largest weather apps had its public listing plan rejected by the China Securities Regulatory Commission. The operating company, named in the CSRC statement as Moji Fengyun (Beijing) Software Technology Development, had filed its IPO prospectus for the ChiNext board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange at the end of 2016, counting Alibaba among its backers, but the plan was only reviewed years later. The regulator raised issues including potential data privacy violations — citing a government probe into how mobile apps collect user data that had singled out Moji for poor practice — and questions about its business model, requiring the company to resolve them before re-filing.

The episode is part of the factual record of China's platform economy: a data-rich consumer service, built in a looser era, meeting the stricter data-protection expectations that later became law. It also underlines why Moji's professional-services pivot mattered commercially: enterprise weather data is a business-to-business revenue line less dependent on consumer-data practices.

International expansion

In October 2024 Moji launched MojiWeather International, taking the platform to overseas users. The international app was initially fully available in thirteen countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and several European states; subsequent releases in March 2025 put the launch footprint at 25 countries across North America, Europe and Asia, with language support expanding from English to French, Spanish and Portuguese. The company bought the moji.com domain for its global push — an earlier industry account describes a seven-figure purchase of the domain from a Japanese holder — replacing its original mojichina.com address.

The international product carries the same core offer: minute- and kilometre-level forecasts queryable at any longitude and latitude, marketed to overseas users as professional meteorological services and decision guidance. For a company whose brand was built entirely inside China, the launch represented its first systematic attempt to convert domestic scale into a global weather service.

Technology approach

Moji's stated technology direction combines three elements: accumulated observational and forecast data from cooperation with professional meteorological organisations domestically and internationally; grid-based forecasting at fine spatial and temporal resolution; and machine learning applied to forecast improvement. The company presents artificial intelligence adoption as a first-mover claim in its field — "taking the lead in introducing advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning into the field of meteorology," in its international launch wording. For users, the practical outputs are the short-fused precipitation forecasts and location-precise conditions that distinguish a modern weather platform from a republication of official city forecasts.

Position in China's weather information market

Within China, Moji's position is that of category leader: the Alibaba Cloud industry history describes it plainly as sitting "in first place in China weather application." Its trajectory — consumer scale first, professional services second, international expansion third — mirrors the maturation path of China's mobile internet leaders, applied to one of the oldest information services of all: the weather forecast. As an information agency, it aggregates the output of the world's meteorological systems, refines it with its own technology, and distributes it at a scale few weather organisations anywhere can match.

Access and official website

Moji Weather's official website is moji.com. The consumer service is delivered through its mobile applications in China and, since 2024, through MojiWeather International in overseas app markets; professional weather data and industry decision services are offered to enterprise customers through the company. For this directory, Moji Weather is recorded as a Beijing, China meteorological information agency.