Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook
Source: Reuters; Call
President Donald Trump on Thursday issued an executive order ordering U.S. companies to stop doing business with popular Chinese apps TikTok, owned by ByteDance, and WeChat, owned by Tencent.
This comes after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said earlier in the week that he was calling on U.S. app stores – which are dominated by Apple and Google – to remove “untrusted” Chinese apps.
“With parent companies based in China, apps like TikTok, WeChat, and others are major threats to U.S. citizens’ personal data, and not to mention tools for CCP content and censorship,” Pompeo said in a briefing with reporters on Wednesday.
It’s unclear how the companies plan to implement the Trump administration’s executive mandate, which takes effect Sept. 20. as the State Department program. Representatives for Apple and Google did not respond to requests for comment.
But both companies have removed many apps in response to requests from foreign governments. It may be unusual for the US to ban apps on a national level, but other governments are doing it all the time.
Between July 2018 and June 2019, Apple removed 851 apps from its platforms in certain regions following legal requests from countries including China, Russia, Norway and Saudi Arabia. When India banned TikTok and WeChat among other Chinese apps in June, the apps were removed within hours from both the App Store and Play Store in that country.
Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed app referrals in China in 2017, saying, “We’d rather not delete apps, but as we do in other countries, we follow the law wherever we do business.”
If the apps are removed from US stores, the vast majority of Americans would not be able to download TikTok, which was the No.2 free app on Apple’s platform on Friday, nor WeChat, which is used by Chinese Americans to stay in touch with family or friends with more than 1 billion users worldwide.
China leads in request for takedown from App Store
Although a wide variety of countries make requests, the leader is far behind in the statistics of Apple China, the goal of Trump’s executive order.
According to Apple, China accounted for nearly three-quarters of the requests for applications between July 2018 and June 2019, and 85% of the apps were removed from Apple’s App Store during that time period. The “vast majority” are involved in pornography, gambling, and illegal content, Apple says. The Google Play Store is not available in China.
Activists in China have long pointed to Apple’s App Store as a choke point that prevents Chinese residents from accessing news or privacy apps from outside the country.
GreatFire, a non-profit that studies China’s national firewall, launched in 2019 a site called Applecensorship.com that tracks app store launches in various markets, and discusses its own numbers on app takedowns and – referrals that focus on total removal, not just removals with official government requests.
In a letter to Congress last month, the group said Apple was using its “wall-garden operating ecosystem” to censor the App Store in China and around the world at the request of the government.
In total, during the year-long period covered by Apple’s transparency reports, 15 different countries requested a total of 1,311 apps to be removed in 150 separate requests for “legal violations”, or alleging that the apps broke the law in that country. Apple challenged the whole thing as part of 12 applications, eventually removing 851 apps from various country versions. 97 other apps were removed in the first half of 2019 when governments informed Apple that the apps violated Apple’s own store guidelines.
Apple does not specify which apps will be removed, but provides limited detail on why governments are demanding the takedowns. In most circumstances, they are, according to Apple, related to illegal gambling or content, or a violation of privacy laws. In 2019, the UAE asked Apple to take down 275 apps for “operating outside government policy.” Apple challenged the request, and did not download any apps.
Apple’s stats currently cover July 2018 through June 2019, so it does not include the India takedowns this summer.
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