Apple has removed some social media apps from its Chinese App Store. This was the result of Beijing’s order to close additional loopholes in the long-standing Great Firewall.
Telegram, WhatsApp, and Signal messengers were put under the knife. Apple, which has consistently maintained one of the world’s strictest Internet censorship regimes, said that the Cyberspace Administration of China had removed the apps for national security reasons.
These takedown orders follow a purge program launched by Chinese regulators in 2023. The program was supposed to remove many non-existent or unregistered apps from domestic iOS and Android stores, including local ones. In August last year, China ordered all mobile app developers to register with the government by the end of March or face closure. In other words, to continue operating in China, developers and their apps must comply with the new licensing regime.
«This will mean that Chinese consumers are largely limited to Chinese apps with few international ones,» said Rich Bishop, co-founder and CEO of AppInChina, a consulting firm. «That’s a pretty significant change, so in a sense it will cut Chinese citizens off even further from the rest of the world».
For years, China has banned the use of foreign messaging and social media platforms such as WhatsApp. These and other bans on the Chinese segment of the network have been called the Great Firewall. This has helped apps like Tencent’s WeChat dominate domestic use. Although Chinese users can still use VPNs to view foreign media.
China’s actions to block US services come at a time when the US government is takes measures to ban TikTok from the Chinese company ByteDance. US politicians also cited national security concerns in an attempt to force the company to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner, otherwise the service would be banned from the US market.
Source: bloomberg