Apple has removed Meta-owned end-to-end encrypted messaging app WhatsApp from its App Store in China following a government order citing national security concerns, Reuters news agency reported on Friday .
Meta’s new Twitter-like text-based social networking app, Threads, was also removed from the App Store for the same reason, it said.
“The China Cyberspace Administration has ordered the removal of these apps from the China Storefront due to its 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 the Apple App Store in China, but declined to provide further details on the removals. “We refer you to Apple for comment,” a Meta spokesperson told us.
We also reached out to Apple to ask about the removals, but as of press time, the iPhone maker had not responded.
According to Reuters, two other messaging apps have also been removed from the Apple App Store in China, namely: Signal and Telegram. He cites data from app tracking companies Qimai and AppMagic for this element of his report.
Apple has not confirmed these two additional removals. But the site AppleCensorship, which tracks App Store removals, records Signal and Telegram as having “disappeared” from Apple’s App Store in mainland China.
We reached out to Telegram regarding the status of its iOS app, but as of press time, it had not responded.
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 downloadable in the past, Signal recordings and messages are apparently blocked,” she said, suggesting it makes little difference if her app no longer appears on the App Store, as users accessing the app from China would not be able to. to register or send messages.
However, the signal does not always appear to have been blocked in this way. In 2021, TechCrunch’s Rita Liao reported that Signal worked flawlessly in China, including without using a VPN. But, presumably, state censors have since further cracked down on the end-to-end encrypted messaging app.
Previous deletions
This is not the first time Apple has removed apps under the direction of China’s internet regulator. Last summer, several generative AI apps were removed from Apple’s China App Store shortly before Chinese regulations targeting generative AI took effect.
Last year, another Twitter alternative, Jack Dorsey-backed Damus, was also removed from Apple’s Chinese App Store shortly after being approved.
A few years ago, audio social networking app Clubhouse was also removed from the Apple store in China shortly after its global release. In recent years, Apple has also removed popular censorship circumvention tools (and previously VPN apps); RSS applications; podcast apps; and even a Quran app, to name just a few other examples.
It is no longer clear why WhatsApp and Threads were targeted for removal from Apple’s Chinese App Store.
One is an end-to-end encrypted messaging (E2EE) application, the other is a microblogging type social media application. (While Telegram offers both private messaging and one-to-many broadcast style features, with a proprietary (non-default) E2EE available only for so-called “secret chats”; while Signal offers a E2EE benchmark in the industry in all aspects of its application.)
Discussions launched in early July last year. The app itself has been blocked by China’s Great Firewall, meaning Chinese users wanting to download it must use a VPN to bypass censorship. Although many of them have clearly succeeded in doing so, Threads quickly found itself in the top 5 of Apple’s Chinese App Store last summer.
A popular app would be more likely to attract more attention from Chinese state censors, potentially encouraging them to take additional steps to crack down on its 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 Chinese App Store, according to AppleCensorship. But as TC’s Liao pointed out, in a 2021 article on the growing use of Signal and Telegram, “China’s censorship decisions can be arbitrary and inconsistent.”
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