Why are Chinese apps still working and continue to appear on Google Play Store?

The Government of India recently took an unprecedented step and banned as many as 59 Chinese apps in the country. Inputs from intelligence agencies have revealed that these mobile apps have been used by developers as either spyware or malware and are in clear violation of the terms of usage, compromising a user's privacy.

The ban has been imposed under Section 69A of the IT Act with relevant provisions of the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking of Access of Information by Public) Rules 2009.

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Why are Chinese apps still working in India?

TikTok, Shein, UC Browser, and ShareIt are some of the widely used Chinese apps that have been banned by the government. However, most of the apps are still listed on the Google Play Store and App Store. This means that users are still able to install these apps on their devices and continue to use them.

TikTok is one of the most popular names on this list that has been removed by Apple and Google and it is likely that the other banned Chinese apps will also be removed in days to come. The government of India has issued a notice to both Apple and Google to restrict these applications on their marquee app stores.

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Why are Chinese apps still not banned completely?

Apart from getting the Chinese apps removed from the app stores, the Indian government is also in talks with Internet Service Providers and telecom operators in the country to help enforce a complete ban on these applications. Once these applications are removed from the Google Play and the App Store, the ISPs will need to blacklist every host-name and domain name that is associated with these Chinese applications for the ban to come into full effect. To ensure a complete ban, the ISPs will need to stop the data traffic on these platforms as data is one of the major factors for these apps to stay functional.

The ban will affect both new installations and existing users on these apps, although some of the apps may continue to work, if not updated. However, it isn't clear whether users who already have these apps should voluntarily uninstall them or will there be a penalty for using them.

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