Apple has removed the Meta-owned encrypted messaging app WhatsApp from its App Store in China following a government order citing national security concerns, according to the news agency. Reuters reported on Friday.
Meta’s newest text-based social networking app, Threads, has also been pulled from the App Store for the same reason, it said.
“The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered the removal of these apps from the Chinese storefront based on their national security concerns,” Apple said in a statement sent to the news agency.
Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that its two apps are no longer available on Apple’s App Store in China, but declined to elaborate on the removals. “We are referring you to Apple for comment,” a Meta spokesperson told us.
We also reached out to Apple with questions about the removals, but at press time the iPhone maker had not responded.
According to Reuters, two other messaging apps have also been removed from Apple’s App Store in China — namely Signal and Telegram. It cites data from app tracking companies Qimai and AppMagic for this component of its report.
Apple has not confirmed these two additional removals. But the Apple censorship sitewhich tracks App Store removals, records both signal and Telegram as it “disappeared” from Apple’s App Store in mainland China.
We reached out to Telegram about the status of the iOS app, but it had not responded at press time.
Asked about the Reuters report, Signal president Meredith Whittaker told TechCrunch that Signal was already blocked in China by the country’s Great Firewall.
“While Signal may have been available for download in the past, Signal recordings and messages are apparently blocked,” he said, indicating that it doesn’t make much difference if his app no longer appears in the App Store, as users who have access in the application from China they will not be able to register or send messages.
However, the signal does not seem to have always been blocked in this way. In 2021, Rita Liao of TechCrunch reported that Signal worked perfectly in China, even without using a VPN. But, presumably, government censors have further restricted the implementation of end-to-end encrypted messaging since then.
Previous deductions
This isn’t the first time Apple has removed apps as directed by China’s internet regulator. Last summer, multiple artificial intelligence apps were removed from Apple’s China App Store shortly before Chinese regulations targeting genetic artificial intelligence took effect.
Last year, another Twitter alternative, Jack Dorsey-backed Damus, was also pulled from Apple’s China App Store shortly after its approval.
A few years ago, the audio social networking app Clubhouse was also pulled from the Apple Store in China shortly after its global launch. In recent years Apple has also removed popular censorship bypass tools (and earlier VPN apps). RSS applications. podcast apps; and even a Quran app, to name a few other examples.
Why WhatsApp and Threads have been targeted for removal from Apple’s Chinese App Store is no longer clear.
One is an end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging application, the other is a microblogging social media application. (Telegram has private messaging features and one-to-many broadcast-style features, with [non-default] proprietary E2EE available only for so-called “secret conversations”; Signal offers the industry gold standard E2EE in all aspects of its application.)
The threads started in early July last year. The app itself is blocked by the Great Firewall of China, meaning users in China who want to download it must use a VPN to bypass censorship. Quite a few have apparently succeeded, as Threads quickly shot into the top 5 of Apple’s App Store in China last summer.
A popular app would be more likely to attract more attention from China’s state censors, potentially encouraging them to take additional steps to curb use — such as ordering Apple to remove the software from its store.
At the same time, other popular apps owned by Meta, Facebook and Instagram, are still available on Apple’s China App Store, per AppleCensorship. But as TC’s Liao pointed out in a 2021 post about the growing use of Signal and Telegram, “China’s censorship decisions can be arbitrary and inconsistent.”
