According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple has banned more than 25,000 gambling apps from the Chinese App Store, along with the developers who distributed them. The fact is that gambling is officially prohibited on the Chinese App Store, but many developers have tried to get around this by publishing apps featuring a variety of partially authorized lotteries.
The Wall Street Journal refers to China Central Television (CCTV), which recently criticized Apple for allowing gambling apps to dominate its catalog. For example, one of the apps was found to be covered by the name of the real lottery company Chongqing Welfare Lottery Distribution Centre, which was only authorized to sell lottery tickets offline. Distributing online lotteries, in turn, requires a separate license from the Ministry of Finance.
As a result, Apple representatives accepted the criticism from closed-circuit television and quickly cleaned up the app catalog, banning thousands of products that are illegal under Chinese standards from its Chinese storefront. As mentioned above, the Wall Street Journal reports about 25,000 requests, while according to Bloomberg, there were about 4,000.
Of course, the company was once again criticized for its management by Chinese authorities. Let me remind you that earlier, Apple had already removed VPN apps from the local App Store, which users had been using to get around the blocking. In addition, developers were forbidden from using the CallKit framework in their products, and were given only two options: remove CallKit from their products, or the apps would be completely removed from the Chinese App Store.
