47 more Chinese apps blocked by India.
47 more Chinese apps, which were clones of the banned 59 applications, blocked by the Indian government.
News agency PTI on Monday reported that the Indian government has banned 47 more Chinese apps which were clones of the previously banned 59 applications hailing from China. Quoting sources, PTI revealed that an order to this effect was issued on Friday. The banned apps include TikTok Lite, SHAREit Lite, Helo Lite, BIGO LIVE Lite, and VFY Lite. Although, there is no official word on the ban yet, and the list of additional apps that have been banned has not been revealed in the public domain. In June, the central government had banned a whopping 59 Chinese apps, which included popular ones like TikTok, UC Browser, and ShareIt, due to a border standoff with China.
China has captured two-thirds of Indian smartphones users:
Citing the Chinese apps of being prejudiced to the sovereignty, integrity, and defence of India, the Ministry of electronics and information technology had banned 59 apps. As per the industry estimates, the Chinese Internet companies have nearly two-thirds of smartphone users in India, with about 300 million different users in the country.
TikTok’s US-based CEO seeks a one-on-one meeting with India’s I&B Minister:
Meanwhile, the Chinese short video platform, TikTok wrote a letter to the Indian government, offering for setting up an engineering centre to design and develop products in India and showed their desire to establish a local data centre in the country. Kevin Mayer, the US-based CEO of TikTok, wrote to the electronics and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad soon after the ban was announced by the central government, over concerns of national security. Mayer has sought a personal meeting with the minister to explain the ByteDance-owned platform’s data-sharing practices.
