Apple removes 25,000 illegal gambling apps from its Chinese App Store

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Apple is removing a slew of apps from its App Store in China in order to comply with the country’s strict regulations.

According to Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television or CCTV, Apple has removed 25,000 gambling apps from its Chinese App Store. This move comes after a number of Chinese media outlets lobbed complaints at the tech giant last month for allegedly allowing gambling, pornography, and counterfeit goods promotions in its App Store. 

State-controlled media had claimed that these gambling and lottery apps were not only illegal, but fake as well, resulting enormous losses for people who were scammed.

“Apple itself has set up the rules on how to allow apps onto its store, but it didn’t follow that, resulting in the proliferation of bogus lottery apps and gambling apps,” CCTV said on Sunday according to the Wall Street Journal.

Apple confirmed the gambling app takedowns, as they are illegal in China, and noted a continuing effort to keep these apps off its App Store.

This isn’t the first time Apple had to remove a genre of applications from its App Store to observe Chinese regulations. Last year, Apple purged VPN apps from the App Store in China as they were being used to get around the Great Firewall, which blocks non-state sanctioned content from reaching its population of more than 1.3 billion. 

In addition, earlier this year, the company had to change how it stored Chinese users’ iCloud data. To comply with Chinese regulations, Apple had to move iCloud data for its China-based users to a telecom company in mainland China. Just last month, a state-owned telecom took over the storage for this data.

Apple is also far from the only U.S.-based tech company dealing with regulation issues in China. Google is currently facing pressure, from both inside and outside the company, over its plans to create a China censorship-friendly search engine. 

Apple, Google, and many other U.S. businesses have found its relationships with China teetering as they’ve been caught in between the trade wars with the country thanks to tariffs handed down by the Trump administration.