8 ms·

Apple deletes WhatsApp, Threads from China app store on orders from Beijing

110 points by bilekas 3y ago

pif 3y ago
Why were people protesting Google doing business with a democracy, and nobody is protesting Apple obeying to a dictatorship?
- kamikazeturtles 3y ago
  I don't think things are as simple as democracy or dictatorship. That democracy, you're referring to, has a pretty bad human rights record. We have to hold everyone accountable
  - TiredOfLife 3y ago
    Compared to China????????!!!!!!??????
    - qzx_pierri 3y ago
      For a lot of Apple fans, the company can never do any wrong. And I say that as someone who owns a Macbook, iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad.
    - miramba 3y ago
      What are you comparing China to? Seriously, it‘s not mentioned in the parents.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
        mc32 3y ago
        It’s not only that, but how they don’t observe civil liberties for their own pop, don’t tolerate their own dissidents, etc. They are harsh on their own civilians.
        jedimind 3y ago
        [flagged]
      - fernandotakai 3y ago
        i would recommend reading on censorship inside china https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China they literally block any discussion on things like... you know, democracy movements.
      - Scharkenberg 3y ago
        Israel.
      - MarkSweep 3y ago
        The unnamed democracy is Israel. The protest referred to was a couple of Google employees protesting a cloud computing contract with that country. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/south-bay/protests-expected-to-continue/3511496/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/south-bay/protests-exp...
        jedimind 3y ago
        [flagged]
        legolas2412 3y ago
        [flagged]
- coldcode 3y ago
  Go to China and violate a serious law. Do you think they will ignore it? Or someone from Mainland China who comes to the US who violates a serious law here. Will they be arrested and possibly convicted? Every country has laws that others find terrible. Every multinational business has to deal with laws in multiple countries that may be incompatible with others. Take, for example, all the issues between the US and the EU regarding privacy and control of personal information. It had to be negotiated for each side to agree. China may not be interested in negotiation, but that is their business. If you want to do business in such a country, you must find a way to deal with it. If you abandon every country where you might have issues, you have a US-only business (and you might not like some of our laws either). Imagine a foreign business wanting slavery instead of employees in the US; they might be fine with it, but we aren't. Should they do it anyway?
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Every multinational business has to deal with laws in multiple countries that may be incompatible with others. Indeed, but why should Western countries allow Chinese companies access to our markets when China offers absolutely zero reciprocity? It's one thing to operate in an economic/political sphere that shares a reasonable set of common political and economic values, and deal with the relatively tiny differences (tax codes, data protection laws, content moderation, advertising restrictions, ...). Hell even with larger differences (EU GDPR vs US laissez-faire), US megacorps can still freely operate in Europe. In contrast, it's a completely different thing to operate in China - either you are outright banned (Meta, Twitter, Google, ...) or you have to have a corporate entity where the foreign party must be below 50% ownership, and in some cases you have to install a parallel governance structure of the CCP [1]. [1] https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/politics-in-the-boardroom-the-role-of-chinese-communist-party-committees/ https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/politics-in-the-boardroom-th...
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      >why should Western countries allow Chinese companies access to our markets when China offers absolutely zero reciprocity? Money. China knows that the only thing the west (and arguably humanity) ultimately cares about is wealth, and so China's playing that game far better than anyone else. We are literally funding our own demise, hoisting our own petards, hitching our own nooses. I find the coming Pax Sino era terrifying and how well they play the world like a flute astonishing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- azangru 3y ago
  If the alternative is having to pay fines or leaving the market, why shouldn't Apple obey? It wants access to the market.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- jedimind 3y ago
  "Why were people protesting Google doing business with a fake democracy that denies 2 million of its second-class citizens equal rights and is currently on a genocidal rampage having murdered 15000+ children, and nobody is protesting Apple obeying to a dictatorship? Fixed it for you. [0] Nation-state Law Essentially Establishes Apartheid Regime - https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-12-22/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-cat-guarding-the-cream-of-self-determination/ https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-12-22/ty-article-op...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- _heimdall 3y ago
  People protest all kinds of things, what aboutism doesn't really explain why a company wanting to do business in a country wouldn't follow the countries laws. If any company wants to do business in China they have to deal with strict CCP censorship. Sure you could argue that Apple should SCT on principle and just leave the Chinese market, but play that strategy out to the end. We would have every company moving towards only doing business in their home country. I don't expect that's what most people in the west want and when anything related to tariffs, onshoring manufacturing, etc comes up it gets thrown out as nationalist BS (or MAGA if you're in the US).
lupire 3y ago
Isn't WhatsApp the primary app for international chat with China?
- chmod775 3y ago
  No. You can use WeChat outside China and that's one of the best ways to keep in contact with someone there.
  - 31337Logic 3y ago
    If by "best way" you mean "worst way" (in terms of privacy violations and intentionally addictive and manipulative algorithms), then I agree. :-/
    - em-bee 3y ago
      it's pretty much the only way. but which intentionally addictive and manipulative algorithms are you talking about? wechat messaging is algorithm free, just like whatsapp or telegram. all messages from all contacts or groups are shown in chronological order.
- molesy 3y ago
  You're probably thinking of WeChat? Which is owned by TenCent.
  - wigster 3y ago
    wiki... Tencent was awarded a score of zero out of 100 in an Amnesty International report ranking technology companies lol
  - jbverschoor 3y ago
    And guess who owns epic games?
    - elabajaba 3y ago
srameshc 3y ago
We all have accepted this kind of compliance from every company doing business in China and move on where it's an authoritarian government, because profits. We should hold the company to the same standards regardless, it's going to probably take many years for that to happen.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  Do we expect corporations to take on other governments for us? It’s not unethical to comply with the law in foreign countries and, while I obviously don’t agree with China’s censorship, they can point out lots of poor human rights abuses on our end yet Chinese companies are expected to follow our laws here too. Apple is just doing what any rational actor would, obeying the laws of recognized governments, and I don’t think it’s fair to expect them to do more. If the American people care that much about the free speech of Chinese citizens it’s a matter for our government, not our corporations.
  - spywaregorilla 3y ago
    Nice. A simultaneous conflation of law with ethics, an appeal to others' immorality as a way to justify your own, and an appeal to corporations only being held to the fiscal rationale ethics system, which is to say, none.
    - mattmaroon 3y ago
      No conflating, ethics are subjective, laws are not. (Or at least, close to not.) One can't build a system on non-codified ethics because they change so much and vary from place to place. Our own legal system has plenty of ethical issues. We lock up almost 5x as many people per capita as China. Should they not do business with us? If corporations stopped doing business with any country someone on HN found to be doing something unethical, we'd all go back to the economic stone age. There's no real argument here, your sentiments are just "big company bad, China bad" with more words.
      - spywaregorilla 3y ago
leftcenterright 3y ago
Is profit and a Chinese market really as important for apple to make it succumb to these orders? Genuinely wondering if there is more to it than sheer desire to preserve market share and profits.
- kredd 3y ago
  About 20% of all iPhones are sold in China. So yeah, make your own conclusions.
- nojvek 3y ago
  Apple stocks are already in the dumps due to them losing market share in China. If Apple cannot innovate themselves into growth they will further slide down to #3 spot behind Google. Apple has saturated its iPhone market and it shows.
donatj 3y ago
And this is why the ability to side load is important
- rpdillon 3y ago
  This is a really strong point. The common narrative around sideloading is that the app store is "safe" and sideloading is dangerous. But Apple doesn't address the case where they are strong-armed into restricting their users' rights. Folks seem to assume that being authoritarian is OK so long as they agree with the rules the authority makes, but the deeper issue is that the deal can be altered at any time.
gruez 3y ago
Isn't whatsapp already blocked in china? It being removed from the chinese app store doesn't make that much of a difference considering you can presumably create a US app store account with a VPN and download it that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
- Sayrus 3y ago
  Can you really just use a VPN, or is the store implemented like they plan on implementing Europe store? (A ban based on device location rather than IP location or account location)
  - throwaway4good 3y ago
    In general all the big US social medias are available if you use a VPN or do roaming using a foreign SIM card in China - both as app or website.
- netsharc 3y ago
  > you can presumably create a US app store account with a VPN I don't think it's that simple, at least with Google the phone seems to see the country code of the SIM card, or the mobile network it's connected to, to determine your "current country" for the Google Play Store. Maybe it will even ask you for a credit card number plus ZIP and country, that Google/Apple can confirm with your CC provider, if you say "Oh it's 90210 USA" and your CC billing address is 200000 Shanghai, your CC provider will say "verification failed". I remember just downloading the APK of an app I needed which was not available for my Google Play country from apkmirror.com (thank Allah for sideloading). It seems like the CCP asking Apple to ban these apps mean that they're getting more afraid about their leaky firewall, blocking them from being downloaded from the app store is another hurdle they've thought of for the Chinese citizenry.
  - gruez 3y ago
    >I don't think it's that simple, at least with Google the phone seems to see the country code of the SIM card, or the mobile network it's connected to, to determine your "current country" for the Google Play Store eject your sim card then, or download an esim from another country and turn on airplane mode >Maybe it will even ask you for a credit card number plus ZIP and country, that Google/Apple can confirm with your CC provider, if you say "Oh it's 90210 USA" and your CC billing address is 200000 Shanghai, your CC provider will say "verification failed". apple explicitly has a "none" payment option[1] [1] https://www.tuneskit.com/images/resource/no-none-option-for-apple-id-payment.png https://www.tuneskit.com/images/resource/no-none-option-for-... >It seems like the CCP asking Apple to ban these apps mean that they're getting more afraid about their leaky firewall, blocking them from being downloaded from the app store is another hurdle they've thought of for the Chinese citizenry. Their firewall tech is top notch[2]. Getting past it is non-trivial (ie. you can't just buy nordvpn subscription and be on your way). Compared to that creating an alt apple account is easy. [2] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentation/wu-mingshi https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentat...
throwaway4good 3y ago
I wonder what is worth more to Meta: Running a Twitter clone in China or TikTok getting banned in the US?
EGreg 3y ago
It’s a good time to share this again: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram-and-why-decentralization-matters/2230/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram... My response to Moxie Marlinspike (founder of WhatsApp) a couple years ago about why decentralization truly matters, despite his critiques.
- ziddoap 3y ago
  >Moxie Marlinspike (founder of WhatsApp) WhatsApp was founded by Brian Acton and Jan Koum. Moxie co-founded Whisper Systems.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    Good point, sorry. Is it right to say he founded the tech and built WhatsApp?
    - ziddoap 3y ago
      No, WhatsApp was founded in 2009. WhatsApp did not partner with Open Whisper Systems until 2014. And the partnership was solely for the Signal Protocol. The rest of the entire app has nothing to do with Moxie at all.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
It's a good thing Apple has a restrictive and exclusive app store to protect us from malware and enable repressive authoritarian regimes everywhere.
drooopy 3y ago
I assume that they will also release a snarky and petty PR response to this explaining how they're going to allegedly protect chinese users from CPP overreach and overregulation, no?
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
Notice that Apple deploys compliance in China, as opposed to the malicious compliance they use in the EU or US. Apple is quite obedient in China. That's because it doesn't want its executives in China to be disappeared, or denied an exit visa, or simply arrested arbitrarily.
- EZ-E 3y ago
  While I'm sure Apple worries about the safety of their executives - the main reason is probably they just want to keep the access to the Chinese market. As factories move away from China, the government has less and less reasons to let them eat their local mobile market share.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    They want to keep access to the US and EU market as well, they just don't fear them in the same way.
- traceroute66 3y ago
  > That's because it doesn't want its executives in China to be disappeared, or denied an exit visa, or simply arrested arbitrarily. Well, to be fair, there are also other more practical factors at play ! 1. The sheer size of the market. Population of China is bigger than that of the US and the EU combined. 2. Although Apple are working on establishing manufacturing elsewhere, a large portion of their manufacturing still happens in China at the moment. I suspect, if you were in Apple's shoes, loosing (1), (2) or both is a far worse position to be in than one or two executives "disappearing". Executives "disappearing" is of course bad, but they are ultimately replaceable. Loosing the Chinese market or having constraints put on your manufacturing at short notice is a significantly bigger problem. Its the same reason Microsoft famously had no choice but to show the Chinese the Windows source code. I'm not defending China. I'm just saying, if you want to have business operations in a country (China or otherwise), you play by their rules. Being a large multi-national will only ultimately give you so much leeway with the authorities.
- asimovfan 3y ago
aragonite 3y ago
There's a law introduced August last year that basically treats app developer like domain registrants by requiring them to register and provide their real contact info and/or company information. Existing apps were given a grace period until Apr this year. It seems that Meta had 7 months to fill out a pretty trivial form but for whatever reason chose not to do so, which is why this is happening. https://m.163.com/dy/article/J04PDGQA055632BB.html?spss=adap_pc https://m.163.com/dy/article/J04PDGQA055632BB.html?spss=adap... https://support.huaweicloud.com/prepare-icp/icp_02_0049.html https://support.huaweicloud.com/prepare-icp/icp_02_0049.html https://m.sohu.com/a/711668155_120284864/?pvid=000115_3w_a https://m.sohu.com/a/711668155_120284864/?pvid=000115_3w_a
- initplus 3y ago
  “They didn’t fill out some trivial form” is never the answer. It’s a show of power by someone, either Chinese govt or Meta.
  - aragonite 3y ago
    I agree it's not the full answer.
- gruez 3y ago
  Apparently whatsapp is blocked in china[1]. I have a feeling that for them it's not as simple as "fill[ing] out a pretty trivial form". Would they even acknowledge the form and/or process it? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
- robjan 3y ago
  This is the truth. My non-banned finance company from Hong Kong is also having to pull its app from the Mainland Apple store because we don't have any interest in formally registering a business entity in China. WhatsApp and Threads are just other instances of organisations without an ICP.
- infamia 3y ago
  Assuming it happened as described, the likely reason is that their apps have been blocked/censored for years (i.e., they don't work) thanks to the Chinese Government.
howlingfantods 3y ago
WhatsApp servers have been blocked in China forever. I lived there for 13 years and the only time I recall using WhatsApp without VPN was in the early 2010s.
daft_pink 3y ago
Is anyone else shocked that they weren’t already banned?
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40083409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40083409
fabiofzero 3y ago
I'm not particularly pro-China, but countries have rules for companies who want to operate in their territory, like it or not. Every time a country that is not the US enforces rules – be it the EU, Brazil, China or whomever else – HackerNews gets fired up for basically no reason. It's the price of doing cross-border business. Companies always have the option to pull out of the country if that's too much compromise.
Fischgericht 3y ago
It's the EU with their damn data privacy laws / communism again!
LeoNatan25 3y ago
Imagine if China users could just visit a website and install apps.

110 points by bilekas 3y ago

pif 3y ago

Why were people protesting Google doing business with a democracy, and nobody is protesting Apple obeying to a dictatorship?

kamikazeturtles 3y ago
I don't think things are as simple as democracy or dictatorship. That democracy, you're referring to, has a pretty bad human rights record. We have to hold everyone accountable
- TiredOfLife 3y ago
  Compared to China????????!!!!!!??????
  - qzx_pierri 3y ago
    For a lot of Apple fans, the company can never do any wrong. And I say that as someone who owns a Macbook, iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad.
  - miramba 3y ago
    What are you comparing China to? Seriously, it‘s not mentioned in the parents.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
      - mc32 3y ago
        It’s not only that, but how they don’t observe civil liberties for their own pop, don’t tolerate their own dissidents, etc. They are harsh on their own civilians.
        jedimind 3y ago
        [flagged]
    - fernandotakai 3y ago
      i would recommend reading on censorship inside china https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China they literally block any discussion on things like... you know, democracy movements.
    - Scharkenberg 3y ago
      Israel.
    - MarkSweep 3y ago
      The unnamed democracy is Israel. The protest referred to was a couple of Google employees protesting a cloud computing contract with that country. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/south-bay/protests-expected-to-continue/3511496/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/south-bay/protests-exp...
      - jedimind 3y ago
        [flagged]
        legolas2412 3y ago
        [flagged]
coldcode 3y ago
Go to China and violate a serious law. Do you think they will ignore it? Or someone from Mainland China who comes to the US who violates a serious law here. Will they be arrested and possibly convicted? Every country has laws that others find terrible. Every multinational business has to deal with laws in multiple countries that may be incompatible with others. Take, for example, all the issues between the US and the EU regarding privacy and control of personal information. It had to be negotiated for each side to agree. China may not be interested in negotiation, but that is their business. If you want to do business in such a country, you must find a way to deal with it. If you abandon every country where you might have issues, you have a US-only business (and you might not like some of our laws either). Imagine a foreign business wanting slavery instead of employees in the US; they might be fine with it, but we aren't. Should they do it anyway?
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Every multinational business has to deal with laws in multiple countries that may be incompatible with others. Indeed, but why should Western countries allow Chinese companies access to our markets when China offers absolutely zero reciprocity? It's one thing to operate in an economic/political sphere that shares a reasonable set of common political and economic values, and deal with the relatively tiny differences (tax codes, data protection laws, content moderation, advertising restrictions, ...). Hell even with larger differences (EU GDPR vs US laissez-faire), US megacorps can still freely operate in Europe. In contrast, it's a completely different thing to operate in China - either you are outright banned (Meta, Twitter, Google, ...) or you have to have a corporate entity where the foreign party must be below 50% ownership, and in some cases you have to install a parallel governance structure of the CCP [1]. [1] https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/politics-in-the-boardroom-the-role-of-chinese-communist-party-committees/ https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/politics-in-the-boardroom-th...
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >why should Western countries allow Chinese companies access to our markets when China offers absolutely zero reciprocity? Money. China knows that the only thing the west (and arguably humanity) ultimately cares about is wealth, and so China's playing that game far better than anyone else. We are literally funding our own demise, hoisting our own petards, hitching our own nooses. I find the coming Pax Sino era terrifying and how well they play the world like a flute astonishing.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
azangru 3y ago
If the alternative is having to pay fines or leaving the market, why shouldn't Apple obey? It wants access to the market.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jedimind 3y ago
"Why were people protesting Google doing business with a fake democracy that denies 2 million of its second-class citizens equal rights and is currently on a genocidal rampage having murdered 15000+ children, and nobody is protesting Apple obeying to a dictatorship? Fixed it for you. [0] Nation-state Law Essentially Establishes Apartheid Regime - https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-12-22/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-cat-guarding-the-cream-of-self-determination/ https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-12-22/ty-article-op...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
_heimdall 3y ago
People protest all kinds of things, what aboutism doesn't really explain why a company wanting to do business in a country wouldn't follow the countries laws. If any company wants to do business in China they have to deal with strict CCP censorship. Sure you could argue that Apple should SCT on principle and just leave the Chinese market, but play that strategy out to the end. We would have every company moving towards only doing business in their home country. I don't expect that's what most people in the west want and when anything related to tariffs, onshoring manufacturing, etc comes up it gets thrown out as nationalist BS (or MAGA if you're in the US).

lupire 3y ago

Isn't WhatsApp the primary app for international chat with China?

chmod775 3y ago
No. You can use WeChat outside China and that's one of the best ways to keep in contact with someone there.
- 31337Logic 3y ago
  If by "best way" you mean "worst way" (in terms of privacy violations and intentionally addictive and manipulative algorithms), then I agree. :-/
  - em-bee 3y ago
    it's pretty much the only way. but which intentionally addictive and manipulative algorithms are you talking about? wechat messaging is algorithm free, just like whatsapp or telegram. all messages from all contacts or groups are shown in chronological order.
molesy 3y ago
You're probably thinking of WeChat? Which is owned by TenCent.
- wigster 3y ago
  wiki... Tencent was awarded a score of zero out of 100 in an Amnesty International report ranking technology companies lol
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  And guess who owns epic games?
  - elabajaba 3y ago

srameshc 3y ago

We all have accepted this kind of compliance from every company doing business in China and move on where it's an authoritarian government, because profits. We should hold the company to the same standards regardless, it's going to probably take many years for that to happen.

mattmaroon 3y ago
Do we expect corporations to take on other governments for us? It’s not unethical to comply with the law in foreign countries and, while I obviously don’t agree with China’s censorship, they can point out lots of poor human rights abuses on our end yet Chinese companies are expected to follow our laws here too. Apple is just doing what any rational actor would, obeying the laws of recognized governments, and I don’t think it’s fair to expect them to do more. If the American people care that much about the free speech of Chinese citizens it’s a matter for our government, not our corporations.
- spywaregorilla 3y ago
  Nice. A simultaneous conflation of law with ethics, an appeal to others' immorality as a way to justify your own, and an appeal to corporations only being held to the fiscal rationale ethics system, which is to say, none.
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    No conflating, ethics are subjective, laws are not. (Or at least, close to not.) One can't build a system on non-codified ethics because they change so much and vary from place to place. Our own legal system has plenty of ethical issues. We lock up almost 5x as many people per capita as China. Should they not do business with us? If corporations stopped doing business with any country someone on HN found to be doing something unethical, we'd all go back to the economic stone age. There's no real argument here, your sentiments are just "big company bad, China bad" with more words.
    - spywaregorilla 3y ago

leftcenterright 3y ago

Is profit and a Chinese market really as important for apple to make it succumb to these orders? Genuinely wondering if there is more to it than sheer desire to preserve market share and profits.

kredd 3y ago
About 20% of all iPhones are sold in China. So yeah, make your own conclusions.
nojvek 3y ago
Apple stocks are already in the dumps due to them losing market share in China. If Apple cannot innovate themselves into growth they will further slide down to #3 spot behind Google. Apple has saturated its iPhone market and it shows.

donatj 3y ago

And this is why the ability to side load is important

rpdillon 3y ago
This is a really strong point. The common narrative around sideloading is that the app store is "safe" and sideloading is dangerous. But Apple doesn't address the case where they are strong-armed into restricting their users' rights. Folks seem to assume that being authoritarian is OK so long as they agree with the rules the authority makes, but the deeper issue is that the deal can be altered at any time.

gruez 3y ago

Isn't whatsapp already blocked in china? It being removed from the chinese app store doesn't make that much of a difference considering you can presumably create a US app store account with a VPN and download it that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...

Sayrus 3y ago
Can you really just use a VPN, or is the store implemented like they plan on implementing Europe store? (A ban based on device location rather than IP location or account location)
- throwaway4good 3y ago
  In general all the big US social medias are available if you use a VPN or do roaming using a foreign SIM card in China - both as app or website.
netsharc 3y ago
> you can presumably create a US app store account with a VPN I don't think it's that simple, at least with Google the phone seems to see the country code of the SIM card, or the mobile network it's connected to, to determine your "current country" for the Google Play Store. Maybe it will even ask you for a credit card number plus ZIP and country, that Google/Apple can confirm with your CC provider, if you say "Oh it's 90210 USA" and your CC billing address is 200000 Shanghai, your CC provider will say "verification failed". I remember just downloading the APK of an app I needed which was not available for my Google Play country from apkmirror.com (thank Allah for sideloading). It seems like the CCP asking Apple to ban these apps mean that they're getting more afraid about their leaky firewall, blocking them from being downloaded from the app store is another hurdle they've thought of for the Chinese citizenry.
- gruez 3y ago
  >I don't think it's that simple, at least with Google the phone seems to see the country code of the SIM card, or the mobile network it's connected to, to determine your "current country" for the Google Play Store eject your sim card then, or download an esim from another country and turn on airplane mode >Maybe it will even ask you for a credit card number plus ZIP and country, that Google/Apple can confirm with your CC provider, if you say "Oh it's 90210 USA" and your CC billing address is 200000 Shanghai, your CC provider will say "verification failed". apple explicitly has a "none" payment option[1] [1] https://www.tuneskit.com/images/resource/no-none-option-for-apple-id-payment.png https://www.tuneskit.com/images/resource/no-none-option-for-... >It seems like the CCP asking Apple to ban these apps mean that they're getting more afraid about their leaky firewall, blocking them from being downloaded from the app store is another hurdle they've thought of for the Chinese citizenry. Their firewall tech is top notch[2]. Getting past it is non-trivial (ie. you can't just buy nordvpn subscription and be on your way). Compared to that creating an alt apple account is easy. [2] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentation/wu-mingshi https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentat...

throwaway4good 3y ago

I wonder what is worth more to Meta: Running a Twitter clone in China or TikTok getting banned in the US?

EGreg 3y ago

It’s a good time to share this again: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram-and-why-decentralization-matters/2230/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram... My response to Moxie Marlinspike (founder of WhatsApp) a couple years ago about why decentralization truly matters, despite his critiques.

ziddoap 3y ago
>Moxie Marlinspike (founder of WhatsApp) WhatsApp was founded by Brian Acton and Jan Koum. Moxie co-founded Whisper Systems.
- EGreg 3y ago
  Good point, sorry. Is it right to say he founded the tech and built WhatsApp?
  - ziddoap 3y ago
    No, WhatsApp was founded in 2009. WhatsApp did not partner with Open Whisper Systems until 2014. And the partnership was solely for the Signal Protocol. The rest of the entire app has nothing to do with Moxie at all.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

It's a good thing Apple has a restrictive and exclusive app store to protect us from malware and enable repressive authoritarian regimes everywhere.

drooopy 3y ago

I assume that they will also release a snarky and petty PR response to this explaining how they're going to allegedly protect chinese users from CPP overreach and overregulation, no?

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

Notice that Apple deploys compliance in China, as opposed to the malicious compliance they use in the EU or US. Apple is quite obedient in China. That's because it doesn't want its executives in China to be disappeared, or denied an exit visa, or simply arrested arbitrarily.

EZ-E 3y ago
While I'm sure Apple worries about the safety of their executives - the main reason is probably they just want to keep the access to the Chinese market. As factories move away from China, the government has less and less reasons to let them eat their local mobile market share.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  They want to keep access to the US and EU market as well, they just don't fear them in the same way.
traceroute66 3y ago
> That's because it doesn't want its executives in China to be disappeared, or denied an exit visa, or simply arrested arbitrarily. Well, to be fair, there are also other more practical factors at play ! 1. The sheer size of the market. Population of China is bigger than that of the US and the EU combined. 2. Although Apple are working on establishing manufacturing elsewhere, a large portion of their manufacturing still happens in China at the moment. I suspect, if you were in Apple's shoes, loosing (1), (2) or both is a far worse position to be in than one or two executives "disappearing". Executives "disappearing" is of course bad, but they are ultimately replaceable. Loosing the Chinese market or having constraints put on your manufacturing at short notice is a significantly bigger problem. Its the same reason Microsoft famously had no choice but to show the Chinese the Windows source code. I'm not defending China. I'm just saying, if you want to have business operations in a country (China or otherwise), you play by their rules. Being a large multi-national will only ultimately give you so much leeway with the authorities.
asimovfan 3y ago

aragonite 3y ago

There's a law introduced August last year that basically treats app developer like domain registrants by requiring them to register and provide their real contact info and/or company information. Existing apps were given a grace period until Apr this year. It seems that Meta had 7 months to fill out a pretty trivial form but for whatever reason chose not to do so, which is why this is happening. https://m.163.com/dy/article/J04PDGQA055632BB.html?spss=adap_pc https://m.163.com/dy/article/J04PDGQA055632BB.html?spss=adap... https://support.huaweicloud.com/prepare-icp/icp_02_0049.html https://support.huaweicloud.com/prepare-icp/icp_02_0049.html https://m.sohu.com/a/711668155_120284864/?pvid=000115_3w_a https://m.sohu.com/a/711668155_120284864/?pvid=000115_3w_a

initplus 3y ago
“They didn’t fill out some trivial form” is never the answer. It’s a show of power by someone, either Chinese govt or Meta.
- aragonite 3y ago
  I agree it's not the full answer.
gruez 3y ago
Apparently whatsapp is blocked in china[1]. I have a feeling that for them it's not as simple as "fill[ing] out a pretty trivial form". Would they even acknowledge the form and/or process it? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
robjan 3y ago
This is the truth. My non-banned finance company from Hong Kong is also having to pull its app from the Mainland Apple store because we don't have any interest in formally registering a business entity in China. WhatsApp and Threads are just other instances of organisations without an ICP.
infamia 3y ago
Assuming it happened as described, the likely reason is that their apps have been blocked/censored for years (i.e., they don't work) thanks to the Chinese Government.

howlingfantods 3y ago

WhatsApp servers have been blocked in China forever. I lived there for 13 years and the only time I recall using WhatsApp without VPN was in the early 2010s.

daft_pink 3y ago

Is anyone else shocked that they weren’t already banned?

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40083409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40083409

fabiofzero 3y ago

I'm not particularly pro-China, but countries have rules for companies who want to operate in their territory, like it or not. Every time a country that is not the US enforces rules – be it the EU, Brazil, China or whomever else – HackerNews gets fired up for basically no reason. It's the price of doing cross-border business. Companies always have the option to pull out of the country if that's too much compromise.

Fischgericht 3y ago

It's the EU with their damn data privacy laws / communism again!

LeoNatan25 3y ago

Imagine if China users could just visit a website and install apps.