Apple said it complied with orders from the Chinese government to remove the Meta-owned WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China. Apple also removed Telegram and Signal from China.
The New York Times similarly wrote that “a person briefed on the situation said the Chinese government had found content on WhatsApp and Threads about China’s president, Xi Jinping, that was inflammatory and violated the country’s cybersecurity laws. The specifics of what was in the content was unclear, the person said.”
“These apps and many foreign apps are normally blocked on Chinese networks by the ‘Great Firewall’—the country’s extensive cybersystem of censorship—and can only be used with a virtual private network or other proxy tools,” Reuters wrote.
“For years, Apple has bowed to Beijing’s demands that it block an array of apps, including newspapers, VPNs, and encrypted messaging services,” The New York Times noted yesterday.
Privacy. That’s iPhone.
Unless the government says otherwise. Because really we don’t give a fuck about you or your privacy.
Honestly, life on Android isn’t going to be much better.
The great firewall blocks Meta, Google, Signal, and Telegram’s sides. So no play store downloads, and no direct APK downloads.
Chinese users on iOS and Android basically have to pirate an IPA or APK, sideload, hope that shit wasn’t compromised by the state, and VPN out of the country.
Yea but at least with android you can download and install apks and find a way around stuff. Apple has their stuff locked down and they make it difficult to do that sort of stuff.
True. That stuff can hamper curb peer to peer distribution, which Chinese citizens have been know to do, since it can bypass ISPs.
That said, if you’re pirating stuff in China and fucking with VPNs already, you’re probably tech literate enough to side load an IPA. It’s not too hard to do without jailbreaking these days.
…what? Use a VPN -> download the APK. Not hard.
APKs are signed so you can easily know if they were tampered with.
My point being, the CCP has already thought about this.
First you need to find a non Chinese VPN that isn’t monitored by the state and or blocked by the great firewall. And searching for great VPN options isn’t exactly great, because search engines like Baidu are monitored and censored.
You can at least modify Android to get rid of crap. You can’t do that with Apple.
Yup. If you want more customization flexibility, Android is the way to go.
That said, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking the CCP isn’t also aggressively trying to censor and monitor communication options for Android phones. Apple is only 15% to 20% of new phone sales in China. Android is the priority for the CCP.
And simply loading up your favorite private VPN and downloading an APK is not the same in China as it in the western world.
Chinese VPNs are monitored by state regulators, non Chinese VPNs can get thrown behind the great firewall, western sites that post their own APKs for direct download get firewalled, etc.
Andoid is the priority for everyone with a brain :) Apple’s walled gardens are harmful for everyone who is not apple.
What would be the point? If they don’t remove it, do you imagine they’d still be selling iPhones in the country?
Only way I can see around this is to buy an android and load your own non-backdoored rom.
Actually - yes I do. Any action against Apple would be a huge blow to both the Chinese and American economies. I’m sure China wants to do that, but right now they cannot do it.
Do you think anyone has ever criticised X Jinping in iMessage? Obviously the answer is yes - and yet iMessage is allowed while every other major (foreign) social network has just been banned. iMessage is now the only major foreign messaging platform allowed in China. That’s not a coincidence - it’s because so many iPhones are manufactured there.
It’s also pretty clear Apple is transitioning to manufacturing elsewhere. They’re on schedule to manufacture a quarter of iPhones in India by some time this year (up from zero not too long ago) and are dipping their toes in South American manufacturing as well. Banning iPhone sales in China would rapidly accelerate those plants.
Apple’s contribution to China’s economy is substantial - those manufacturing plants are huge and have hundreds of thousands of other companies supplying them. Also the workers are very well paid (for a factory job in China).
I assumed the Chinese government had a back door in that version of iMessage.
I’d be glad to be wrong.
Yeah you’d be wrong. Apple is very open about how the security model works - which is similar to Signal and fully encrypted. The only way to decrypt a message is with physical access to one of the sender/recipient’s devices.
Their claims about how it operates have been confirmed by open source developers reverse engineering the protocol (e.g. Beeper).
There is one workaround — device backups can be accessed and depending how you backup, your message history is likely in there (you can do encrypted backups, but that means data loss if you forget your password or an attacker changes it on you which would happen, lots of money in a ransomware attack like that). However even then – all your other devices show a popup message if you restore from a backup - warning that a “new device” has access to your messages.
I’m sure Apple was dragged, kicking their feet and screaming all the way, into banning all the competing services too…
Correct. There is no Play Store in China, and although some of these apps have APKs that are hosted on the web, I’m imagining that the great firewall is going to block that eventually, if it’s they’re not already being blocked.
So, yeah, you’re going to have to side load APKs and IPAs if you want these apps in China. And hopefully you’re not installing a binary that has been compromised by the state.
The point isn’t what they did or do. It’s what they claim. They claim to care about you and your privacy but comply with governments.
If they really care about privacy, they would allow sideloading of apps to circumvent bans. But, in fact, they created a walled garden where the walls follows the governments requirements to maximize the profits at the cost of the privacy.