How people are cheating in China's live trivia games
Trivia app boom leads to cheating app boom
At 1pm on a Tuesday, more than 416,000 people tuned in for Race to the Top. A quiz game similar to HQ Trivia, a live host asked a series of questions with multiple choice answers, with the winners getting a cash prize.
At the same time, around 5,000 of those players had a second app running in the background: Jiuhuang Quiz Assistant.
That app sends you answers to all the questions in Race to the Top as notifications, so you don’t need to look at another device -- the answers will just appear at the top of your screen. It’s not perfect: It generally only gets 7 or 8 questions right (out of 12), and customer service told me it doesn’t work well on iOS because it suspends apps in the background after a few minutes.
Live trivia games are huge in China. More than a dozen have sprung up in the last month alone -- and all look very similar to HQ Trivia. Some are standalone games, while others were added to existing apps, with giants like Baidu, NetEase and Xiaomi all joining in.