Unless a last-minute deal is agreed, President Trump is going to ban ultra-popular Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat from the U.S. starting Sunday, the Department of Commerce announced Friday.
TikTok is consistently the most downloaded non-gaming app in the world. In the U.S., it currently has around 100 million monthly users. WeChat, while nowhere near as big in the U.S., is China’s most important app and widely used by many Chinese-Americans to communicate with friends and family back home.
Apple won’t be forced to boot messaging app WeChat out of the App Store in China, Bloomberg claims in a weekend report.
According to the publication, the Trump administration is “privately seeking to reassure” American companies like Apple that they can still do business with WeChat in China. Two weeks ago, Trump ordered a U.S. ban on WeChat, although the details were not clarified.
A WeChat ban imposed by President Donald Trump could cost Apple more than $25 billion per year, claims a report published Monday.
Those numbers are based on the idea that 75% of iPhone and iPad sales could dry up in China. Apple would lose money not just from the missing device sales, but also from the resulting decline in its subscription services.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps Signal and QQ reportedly spiked following President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting Tencent’s WeChat.
WeChat, while not particularly widely used in the United States, is an essential app in China. Many people who use it in the United States do so to keep in touch with friends and family in China, where WhatsApp has been banned since 2017.
Booting WeChat out of the App Store could drive down worldwide iPhone shipments by up to 30%, claims respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
While WeChat’s total removal from the App Store seems an unlikely prospect, it could be the worst-case scenario of President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to stop U.S. transactions with WeChat and parent company Tencent.
President Donald Trump’s executive order blocking “transactions” involving Tencent’s WeChat will not hurt games owned, or partially owned, by the company.
That means it would not affect the likes of Riot Games’ League of Legends or Epic Games’ Fortnite, both of which have financial ties to Tencent. Instead, the executive order covers only WeChat transactions.
This post is presented by Wondershare.
A new iPhone means making sure your old app data makes it across from your old one. Even with backups, though, some apps like WhatsApp will simply start fresh on a new device. However, you can use an app like Dr.Fone to move accounts and chats from one device to the next. Here’s how it works.
Nearly 1 billion users of Chinese messaging app WeChat will soon be able to resume sending tips to content creators with their iPhones.
Tipping a fellow user is a big part of the popular social media platform in China. However, last year a dispute over whether Apple should get a healthy cut of those tips basically blocked WeChat tipping.
Mainland China is Apple’s second biggest market, and will one day be its first. The company is making a big push on the mainland, opening new stores and investing in home-grown companies. Why the interest? Because China is the new Japan — it’s where the future is happening. All this week we take a look at the cutting-edge apps that define mobile life on the mainland.
SHANGHAI CITY, China — Now that I use WeChat, I don’t need much else when it comes to social media apps. In fact, WeChat has almost entirely replaced text messaging in China. I am able to link up with other WeChat users through their username without providing a telephone number, so it is a great platform for communicating with new acquaintances or people I am working with.
I have hundreds of WeChat contacts, but only a handful of telephone numbers in my iPhone. The app also recently introduced group video messaging and has an extensive WeChat Wallet service (similar to Zhifubao) available to Chinese bank account holders.
Mainland China is Apple’s second biggest market, and will one day be its first. The company is making a big push on the mainland, opening new stores and investing in home-grown companies. Why the interest? Because China is the new Japan — it’s where the future is happening. All this week we take a look at the cutting-edge apps that define mobile life on the mainland.
SHANGHAI CITY, China — Just like their U.S. counterparts, Chinese youth obsess over their smartphones. But while the phones they use look the same, the apps are quite different: China has its own must-have apps that keep users’ eyes glued to screens at all hours of the day.
Some Chinese apps seem quite similar to their Western counterparts, but others boast innovative and intriguing features. Apple’s clearly interested: While slowing growth in China put a dent in APPL stock, Cupertino recently made a strategic $1 billion investment in Chinese Uber rival Didi Chuxing.
What other apps in China might grab Apple’s attention? Tim Cook could start his due diligence with this list of powerhouse Chinese iPhone apps. The country’s young people use these apps to listen to music, make purchases, get around town, interact with others and maintain their online identities.
These Chinese apps are impressive and convenient, and they are showing us the future of mobile: a world where everything is at our fingertips.
The App Store suffered its worst security breach in history over the weekend, when it was discovered that hundreds of Chinese apps have a malicious program dubbed ‘XcodeGhost’ embedded in their software.
The huge security lapse made its way into legitimate apps thanks to Chinese developers who used a counterfeit version of Apple’s Xcode software that was uploaded to file sharing service Baidu. By using XcodeGhost to compile their apps, developers accidentally allowed the malicious code to be distributed through the App Store.
Apple has pulled infected apps off the store to stop stop the spread, but users still need to delete XcodeGhost apps off their devices manually. Most of the apps infected are mostly used in China, however some big name apps like WeChat, Angry Birds 2, and Didi Chuxing (Uber’s biggest rival in China) were also hit.
Here’s a full list of infected apps:
Apple Stores won’t have the Apple Watch on display for a few weeks, but anyone eager to see what the world of wrist apps will offer can already download them to their iPhone.
The first wave of Apple Watch-supported apps started hitting iTunes today, with big names like Target, Evernote, WeChat and Expedia being some of the first out of the gate. You can’t actually use the Apple Watch functionality on the apps yet (unless Tim Cook hooked you up with an early unit), but you can get an early glimpse of how some apps will dramatically change your life.
Here are some of the first Apple Watch apps you can download and their features:
