Apple said it complied with orders from the Chinese government to remove the Meta-owned WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China. Apple also removed Telegram and Signal from China.
The New York Times similarly wrote that “a person briefed on the situation said the Chinese government had found content on WhatsApp and Threads about China’s president, Xi Jinping, that was inflammatory and violated the country’s cybersecurity laws. The specifics of what was in the content was unclear, the person said.”
“These apps and many foreign apps are normally blocked on Chinese networks by the ‘Great Firewall’—the country’s extensive cybersystem of censorship—and can only be used with a virtual private network or other proxy tools,” Reuters wrote.
“For years, Apple has bowed to Beijing’s demands that it block an array of apps, including newspapers, VPNs, and encrypted messaging services,” The New York Times noted yesterday.
Just be careful if the trusted download sources also get blocked.
I know sideloading is a big concern for the folks over at Signal. They’ve been worried about compromised APKs floating around.
Yeah, Signal is a funny one. Claim to be about privacy and then don’t put their app on F-Droid.
They had a reasonable argument a long time ago. They didn’t want fdroid to sign their app. They wanted to sign their own app. But now fdroid supports reproducible builds where the app developer signs their own app. So that argument has been addressed and they still haven’t done it.
I think The signal leadership is still emotional about the big debate at the time