Foxconn, Apple’s largest manufacturing partner, was this weekend forced to close one its biggest plants due to a citywide lockdown. Another COVID-19 outbreak has put all of Shenzhen, China, out of action until March 20 at the earliest.
The city, home to 17.5 million people, houses the Longhua Science & Technology Park — sometimes dubbed “Foxconn City” — which features 15 factories, worker dormitories, grocery stores, restaurants, and more.
Xiaomi is in “a war of life and death” with iPhone, according to the company’s CEO, and the only way it’s going to regain its position as the top smartphone-maker in China is by matching Apple’s “product and experience.”
The Chinese company was once famous for taking a little too much inspiration from Apple and rolling out copycat products. It has (mostly) moved away from that in recent years, and it hasn’t helped its market share.
Apple CEO Tim Cook “secretly” struck a deal with China in which he agreed to invest around $275 billion of Apple’s money to boost the country’s economy and “technological prowess,” according to a new report.
The five-year agreement was allegedly made during a series of visits Cook made to China in 2016 amid growing regulatory hostilities toward Cupertino. Since then, Apple has become China’s biggest smartphone brand.
We’re still weeks away from Apple Watch Series 7’s official debut, but that hasn’t stopped Chinese manufacturers from churning out their clones. The knockoffs feature flatter designs that could closely match the real thing.
Apple’s plan to start assembling more products in Vietnam is reportedly on hold due to COVID-19 disruptions and limited engineering resources.
It is believed the company’s third-generation AirPods, expected to arrive later this year, will be mass-produced in China instead.
Apple has thwarted an attempt by multiple Chinese tech companies to get around its App Tracking Transparency feature, the Financial Times reports Monday.
The group of tech companies includes Baidu, Tencent, and TikTok parent company ByteDance. They supposedly worked with a couple of Beijing companies to find a new way to get around Apple’s new privacy measures.
However, Apple blocked updates to several apps that included the workaround, called the Chinese Advertising ID (CAID). In doing so, it enforced its rules in a way that may have surprised the companies in question.
The app for Didi Chuxing, the popular Chinese ride-hailing service, has been removed from the App Store in China, citing privacy concerns.
This is no usual case of Apple booting an app from the App Store for failing to measure up to its standards, though. In fact, Apple CEO Tim Cook sits on Didi’s board of directors, and Apple previously invested $1 billion in the Chinese Uber rival. Instead, the ban was ordered by China’s Cyberspace Administration of China regulators — citing “serious violations [regarding] collection and usage of personal information.”
Apple this week launched its App Store search advertising business in mainland China, five years after it arrived in the United States. Called Apple Search Ads, the targeted ads feature works similar to Google ads by letting developers bid to get advertising space for certain keywords.
Debuting Apple Search Ads in one of Apple’s biggest markets comes at the same time that Apple is cracking down on targeted advertising from other companies. Features like iOS 14’s App Transparency Tracker lets users opt out of personalized tracking from other companies. But while they’re struggling, Apple’s seemingly making the move to expand its own ad empire.
The U.S. Senate passed a bill Tuesday that could see the United States invest $52 billion in growing its own chip manufacturing technologies. The $52 billion is part of a broader bipartisan bill. In total, it aims to invest close to $250 billion in U.S. manufacturing and technology.
The bill passed Tuesday with a 68-32 vote. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer described it as likely to “go down as one of the most important things this chamber has done in a very long time.”
It is an attempt to wrestle back control of some of the world’s tech manufacturing from China.
Seven Apple suppliers in China are accused of using forced Uyghur labor, a report for The Information reveals.
The companies in question include Advanced-Connectek, AcBel Polytech, Avary Holding, CN Innovations, Luxshare Precision Industry, Shenzhen Deren Electronic Co., and Suzhou Dongshan Precision Manufacturing Co.
All participated in what are referred to by the Chinese government as “poverty alleviation programs.” However, these may not be exactly how they sound.
It’s not just U.S. tech giants that fear iOS 14.5’s new App Tracking Transparency feature. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, with a market cap of $646.84 billion, is supposedly very worried, just like Facebook.
A report from The Information says Alibaba invited half a dozen marketing execs to its Hangzhou headquarters to discuss how to react to the new feature, which stops apps from tracking users across websites and third-party apps.
Venture capitalist, early Facebook investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel criticized Apple for being too close to China.
At a virtual event held Tuesday by California nonprofit Richard Nixon Foundation, Thiel said the United States should put a “lot of pressure” on Apple because of its links to the Asian country.
End-to-end-encrypted messaging app Signal is secure. So secure, in fact, that it’s the European Union’s encrypted messaging app of choice.
Unfortunately, it’s also secure enough that it’s gotten on the wrong side of the Chinese government. China has reportedly banned the app in mainland China as of March 16, TechCrunch reports. This is one day after its website was blocked in the country.
China’s state-backed China Advertising Association is already looking for ways to get around Apple’s upcoming App Tracking Transparency feature, the Financial Times reported Tuesday.
The organization’s approach reportedly involves something called a “CAID.” This can supposedly act as an alternative means of tracking users to the iPhone’s ad identifier, or IDFA. TikTok parent company ByteDance issued a guide for app developers that describes how marketers “can use CAID as a substitute if the user’s IDFA is unavailable.”
For years, China has been Apple’s biggest manufacturing hub for building its devices. But that’s now changing, with a report Wednesday claiming that Apple is “ramping up” production of iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other products in other parts of the world.
This is an attempt by Apple to diversify manufacturing beyond China, following trade tensions between the U.S. and China in recent years.
The App Store in China had its biggest single-day removal of apps ever — with a massive 39,000 games given the boot by Apple on Thursday alone. This is as a result of Chinese laws stating that all game publishers must obtain a special license in order to distribute their titles.
According to research firm Qimai, only 74 of the top 1,500 games in the App Store survived the massive app bloodbath. Major titles that vanished included the likes of Assassin’s Creed Identity and NBA 2K20.
Apple removed approximately 94,000 games from the App Store in China during 2020, The Wall Street Journal reports. This is a significantly larger number than last year’s tally of 25,000 games removed.
The escalation comes as China works harder to clamp down on illegal content on mobile platforms. The WSJ says the larger number illustrates Apple’s “vulnerability to state pressure” on its business.
Apple engineers used remote control robots and iPads equipped with custom augmented reality software to guide technicians in overseas factories, due to the coronavirus lockdown.
Usually Apple engineers make frequent visits to places like China, where Apple carries out manufacturing. However, this year’s coronavirus lockdown has made this impossible — leading to Apple having to make some tech-savvy adjustments.
Apple has pulled the Tripadvisor app from its China App Store on the orders of the Chinese government as it works to “clean up” the internet, CNN reports.
The Tripadvisor app, which somehow ran afoul of the government, was one of 105 apps deemed to be illegal. Since the Tripadvisor app is mainly concerned with hotel reviews, its removal seems more than a little surprising. However, it’s far from the first app to get the boot from the localized China App Store.
Apple was one of several large companies that reportedly lobbied to weaken a bill that sought to bar U.S. companies from making products in China with the aid of forced Uighur labor, according to The New York Times.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act passed the House with a 406-3 margin in September, and has the necessary support to pass the Senate. It aims to ban U.S. companies from importing products made in the Xinjiang region unless the manufacturers can prove they do not use forced labor.
Apple has reportedly asked Foxconn to shift some iPad and MacBook production from China to Vietnam. The move is said to be a precautionary measure designed to minimize any impact of ongoing trade tensions between the U.S. and China, sources say.
A class action lawsuit against Apple claims that the company hid news of declining iPhone demand in China, thereby triggering billions of dollars lost on the part of investors.
The case, brought against Apple by a UK pension fund, has been given the go-ahead by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. It concerns comments made by Tim Cook during an investor call back in 2018.
It’s not just Apple that’s piling on the pressure when it comes to getting Taiwanese tech companies to move their manufacturing out of China.
According to a report published Thursday, the American Institute in Taiwan, the “de facto U.S. embassy,” is visiting companies and asking why they’re not moving more quickly in exporting their production capacity outside China.
Apple has reportedly removed a pair of RSS reader apps, Reeder and Fiery Feeds, from the App Store in China due to their ability to allow users to access information the country would rather they not see.
It’s not clear exactly what prompted this particular banning, but China has been cracking down on RSS feeds since 2007. That year, it initiated a blanket ban on all web-based RSS feed aggregators. In 2017, Apple removed RSS reader app Inoreader from the App Store in China.
In other words, this may be less a case of “What did Reeder and Fiery Feeds do wrong?” than “how did they manage to survive as long as they did?”
Apple’s division of its supply chain into one part aimed at the China market and the other aimed at the rest of the world continues apace. The goal? Helping Apple get around rumbling trade tensions between the United States and China.
According to a Friday report from Digitimes, Apple is giving more orders to Chinese firms Luxshare Precision and BYD for the Apple Watch Series 6 and Wi-Fi iPad series, respectively.
