How to download from Alipan outside China

Alipan has stricter account walls than most Chinese cloud services and throttles overseas downloads heavily. Here is what that means in practice and how to work around it.

Alipan (also known as Aliyun Drive) has a reputation for being cleaner and faster than Baidu Pan inside China. Outside China, the experience is a different story. The account wall is stricter, the throttling is real, and the English-language tooling around it is thinner than Baidu Pan's.

If someone has sent you an Alipan link and you are outside China, this guide covers what you are actually dealing with and the most practical path to getting your file.

Key takeaways

Alipan registration requires a Chinese phone number with no exceptions and no workarounds, unlike Baidu Pan where some partial workarounds exist.
Overseas download speeds are unstable, fluctuating between 1MB/s and under 100KB/s unpredictably within the same session.
The Alipan app is only available through the Chinese App Store or as an Android APK and is entirely in Chinese.
Paid mirror tools that support Alipan are the most practical option for overseas users who need consistent results.

The account wall is harder than Baidu Pan

Getting a Baidu Pan account as a non-Chinese user is difficult but sometimes possible with enough effort. Alipan is stricter. Registration requires a Chinese phone number, full stop. There is no alternative verification method, no way to connect a foreign account, and no partial workaround that gets you logged in.

The Alipan app is distributed through the Chinese App Store on iOS and as a direct APK download on Android. The interface is entirely in Chinese with no English language option. Even users who manage to source the app face a registration flow designed entirely for a domestic audience.

Overseas download speeds

Even with access to an Alipan account, downloading from outside China is unstable. Speeds fluctuate unpredictably, sometimes reaching 1MB/s and dropping to under 100KB/s within the same session. The routing between Alibaba's infrastructure and overseas connections is inconsistent in a way that makes large file downloads unreliable.

Unlike Baidu Pan where the throttling is deliberate and consistent, Alipan's overseas slowdowns feel more like infrastructure routing issues. The result for the end user is the same: files that take far longer to arrive than the file size would suggest.

The most practical path

For overseas users who need to download from Alipan consistently, a paid mirror service that explicitly supports Aliyun Drive is the most reliable option. The service handles the domestic-side access and hands you a direct download link, which sidesteps both the account wall and the unstable overseas routing.

BAIDUDL supports Alipan alongside Baidu Pan, Quark Pan, 123Pan, Xunlei, and several other Chinese cloud services. If your files come from multiple Chinese platforms, a tool with broad service coverage avoids having to use a different tool for each source.

If you only need one file

One-time plans on paid tools do not require an account or subscription. You paste the link, select a plan that covers the file size, pay, and receive a direct download link by email. For a single Alipan download, that is usually the path of least resistance compared to sourcing the app, navigating a Chinese-language registration flow, and dealing with unstable routing on the download itself.