China Mobile says it will officially shut down several long-running legacy services at 24:00 on April 30, 2026, marking the end of another piece of China’s early mobile internet era.
According to a Xinhua report cited by IT Home, the carrier recently announced that five products will be taken offline as part of an operating strategy adjustment: Hehe Life, Nongxintong, Mobile Market, 12590 voice magazine, and the nationwide short-message and multimedia-message service tied to Monternet.
The best-known name in that list is probably Monternet. China Mobile introduced it in 2000 as a unified brand for mobile data services. The platform covered a wide range of early-phone functions, including SMS, MMS, WAP-based mobile browsing, mobile games, and other information services that were once central to the pre-smartphone experience.
At its peak, Monternet reached about 90 million monthly users by 2009. That gives some sense of how important these legacy mobile services used to be before app stores and modern smartphones took over.
That transition had been underway for a long time. As smartphones and 4G networks became mainstream, older WAP portals steadily lost relevance and were replaced by native apps. China Mobile had already shut down Monternet’s hotspot news service on December 20, 2019, and some service-provider SMS and MMS offerings under the Monternet umbrella stopped operating from August 31, 2025.
This latest move looks like the final cleanup step for a set of products that once helped define mobile internet access in China. For longtime users, the shutdown of Monternet, Mobile Market, and related WAP services feels a bit like the official end of an older generation of phones and services.
