US tech giant Apple announced on Friday that it is removing the WhatsApp and Threads apps from China’s digital App Store, in an escalation of the technology war that has erupted between the two countries.
The iPhone maker said the Cyberspace Administration was the one to request that WhatsApp and Threads be removed from the App Store due to national security concerns.
Apple explained that it had no choice but to agree.
“We are obliged to follow the laws of the countries in which we operate, even if we do not agree with them.
A person asked about the matter replied that the Chinese government found that the two apps contained content that attacked the country’s president and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, and violated the country’s cybersecurity laws.
The same person declined to provide details about the specific content.
Several other global messaging apps have also been pulled from Apple’s Chinese App Store, including US-based Signal and the famous Russian-made and Dubai-based Telegram.
The recent unilateral actions have pushed Apple and Meta into an ever-escalating “war” between the tech giants of China and the US.
In addition, right now, the US House of Representatives is preparing a resolution that could force the Chinese company ByteDance to either sell the popular platform TikTok or withdraw it from the US market.
US congressmen and senators have argued that the instrument in question is a national security risk because of its ties to China.
For their part, Chinese government officials have strongly condemned the forced sale of TikTok.
The White House has also recently sought to limit Beijing’s access to advanced technologies that could be used in warfare, as well as expand control over the dollars used to finance the development of such technology within Chinese borders.
On the other hand, China has long blocked the use of American websites such as Facebook and Instagram by its citizens, using a complex system called The Great Firewall.
Although WhatsApp, one of the most popular private messaging platforms, and Threads were legal in the country, their use was still limited.
For example, WhatsApp has been downloaded 15 million times on iPhone since it launched in 2017, while Threads has 470,000 users, according to Appfigures.
