Apple has been removed Two of China’s most popular mobile apps are appearing in the app store after receiving an order from China’s largest trading regulator and research authority, it has learned. The move comes as a flurry of reports and finka disappears from the IOS App store and several Android app stores that were added to Chinese social media over the weekend. The apps seem to work for users in the country who just downloaded them.
“We follow the laws in the countries where we operate. Based on the order from the Cyberpace management in China, we have released these two applications from email only,” said a spokesperson for Apple. Apple clarified that the applications were not available in other countries for a while. “At the beginning of the year, the developer of finka was chosen to remove the application from supermarkets outside of China, and Blue was only available in China.”
Most of the country’s LGBTQ+ apps have been banned in China. Grindr was removed from the Apple Chinese store in 2022.
China decriminalized homosexuality in the 1990s, but the government does not recognize same-sex marriage. In recent years, China’s LGBTQ+ community has been increasingly oppressed as the Chinese Communist Party tightens its control over society and free speech. Several gay rights organizations in China have closed, and social media companies now often have LGBTQ+ accounts.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In July, there was a sudden explosion of new user registrations without giving an explanation, according to a Chinese social media post. For a month, Chinese users who want to enter the platform have been paying $20 for integrated accounts of Ecommerce websites. But registration resumed in mid-August.
In 2020, Bluecety, blued’s parent company, went public. It announced that the app has more than 49 million registered users and more than six million active users. In the same year, Bluecity said it was acquiring finka, its main competitor in China, for about $33 million. The company revealed in 2022 and was found in the newly born city, Hong Kong-Sisti Media Fife of Hong Kong. Most of Blued’s long-time employees, including the founder of the oil company, left the company after the acquisition, said an employee who collected it on condition of anonymity for privacy reasons.
