India has banned an additional 54 apps — including Tencent’s Xriver and NetEase’s Onmyoji Arena — with links to China, the latest in a series of similar moves over the past one and half years on ground of national security.
Some of the newly prohibited apps, which include Sweet Selfie HD, Beauty Camera, Viva Video Editor, AppLock and Dual Space Lite, are clones or rebrands of many of the over 300 apps affiliated with Beijing that New Delhi has banned since mid-2020 amid escalating geopolitical tension among the two nations.
India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology made the order, citing the Section 69a of the IT ACT, 2000. In a statement, a Google spokesperson acknowledged the order and said the firm was complying.
“On receipt of the interim order passed under Section 69A of the IT Act, following established process, we have notified the affected developers and have temporarily blocked access to the apps that remained available on the Play Store in India,” a Google spokesperson said Monday.
The series of blocking began in late June 2020 when India banned TikTok, Alibaba’s UC Browser and Tencent’s WeChat and dozens of other apps with links to China over national security concerns. New Delhi, which has never explicitly mentioned China in these announcements, did not offer an official statement on its move Monday.
The Indian government has since extended the ban to over 200 more apps including popular title PUBG. That game remains the only known app that has made a return to Google Play Store and Apple’s AppStore in India in some way.
Several of other firms and app operators have attempted to address New Delhi’s concerns, but the Indian government retained its decision early last year after deeming the responses inadequate.
Market size, by the sheer volume of app downloads. (Data period: 2021. Image and data credits: App Annie)
India is by far the largest market globally by app installs. Last year, the South Asian nation clocked over 25 billion downloads, according to analytics firm App Annie.
US giants as well as firms from other nations including China and South Korea aggressively focused on India in the past decade as they looked for the next great growth region. In comparison, only a handful of Indian firms operate in China.
After India refused to revoke its ban on TikTok, ByteDance (the app’s parent firm) laid off the vast majority of its employee base in India and recently shut down its edtech business in the country, TechCrunch reported. The ban in India did not make much impact on ByteDance’s revenue.
