Amazon's audiobook service Audible and phone apps for reading the holy books of Islam and Christianity have disappeared from the Apple store in mainland China, the latest examples of the impact of the country's tightened rules for internet firms.
Audible said Friday that it removed its app from the Apple
store in mainland China last month “due to permit requirements."
The makers of apps for reading and listening to the Quran
and Bible say their apps have also been removed from Apple's China-based store
at the government's request.
Apple didn't return requests for comment Friday. A
spokesperson for China's embassy in the US declined to speak about specific app
removals but said the Chinese government has “always encouraged and supported
the development of the Internet."
“At the same time, the development of the Internet in China
must also comply with Chinese laws and regulations," said an emailed
statement from Liu Pengyu.
China's government has long sought to control the flow of
information online, but is increasingly stepping up its enforcement of the
internet sector in other ways, making it hard to determine the causes for a
particular app's removal.
Chinese regulators this year have sought to strengthen data
privacy restrictions and limit how much time children can play video games.
They are also exerting greater control over the algorithms used by tech firms
to personalize and recommend content.
The popular US language-learning app Duolingo disappeared
from Apple's China store over the summer, as have many video game apps. What
appears to link Audible with the religious apps is that all were recently
notified of permit requirements for published content.
Pakistan Data Management Services, which makes the Quran
Majeed app, said it is awaiting more information from China's internet
authority about how it can be restored. The app has nearly 1 million users in
China and about 40 million worldwide, said the Karachi-based company.
Those who had already downloaded the app can still use it,
said Hasan Shafiq Ahmed, the company's head of growth and relationships.
“We are looking to figure out what documentation is needed
to get approval from Chinese authorities so the app can be restored," he
said in an email.
The maker of a Bible app said it removed it from the Apple
store in China after learning from Apple's App Store review process that it
needed special permission to distribute an app with “book or magazine
content." Olive Tree Bible Software, based in Spokane, Washington, said
it's now reviewing the requirements to obtain the necessary permit “with the
hope that we can restore our app to China's App Store and continue to
distribute the Bible worldwide."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned Apple's
actions, saying the company was enabling China's religious persecution of
Muslims and others.
“This decision must be reversed," said a statement from
CAIR's national deputy director, Edward Ahmed Mitchell. “If American
corporations don't grow a spine and stand up to China right now, they risk
spending the next century subservient to the whims of a fascist superpower.”
The removals were first detected this week by watchdog
website AppleCensorship, which monitors Apple's app store to detect when apps
have been blocked, especially in China and other countries with authoritarian
governments.
This week, Microsoft said that it would shut down its main
LinkedIn service in China later this year, citing a “significantly more
challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in
China.”
Unlike LinkedIn, which has been offering a specialized Chinese service since 2014, Amazon-owned Audible said it does not have a dedicated service for customers in China.