Last summer, at the outset of Beijing’s share-bike craze, grey-and-orange Mobikes began to appear sporadically around the Chinese capital.
Riders could find and unlock them by using the company’s smartphone app. This was Mobike’s great innovation. Unlike Boris bikes in London, riders can leave them anywhere. They do not have to be tethered to a docking station.
But there were not that many bicycles to start off with. Using Mobikes became similar to playing Pokémon Go, the game whose players race each other to capture virtual avatars at real world locations. By the time a Mobike user located the bicycle supposedly parked just around the corner, there was a good chance someone else was already riding away on it.