Amaya Toman Late last week, Apple officially confirmed that it had removed a large number of illegal gambling apps from its App Store in China and terminated cooperation with their developers.
"Gambling apps are illegal in China and must not be on the App Store," Apple said in a statement. "We have currently removed a number of apps and developers who tried to distribute illegal gambling games through our App Store, and we will continue to do our best to carefully search for these apps and prevent them from appearing on the App Store," he adds.
According to Chinese media, 25 apps of this type were removed from the App Store as of Sunday. This is less than two percent of the estimated total of 1,8 million apps in the Chinese App Store, but Apple has not officially confirmed or denied these numbers.
Apple began cracking down on gambling iOS games earlier this month. He provided the following statement to the developers responsible for the apps in question:
In order to reduce fraudulent activity on the App Store and to comply with government requirements to address illegal gambling operations, we will no longer allow uploads of gambling apps submitted by individual developers. This applies both to playing for real money and to applications that imitate this playing.
As a result of this activity, your app has been removed from the App Store. You can no longer distribute gambling apps from your account, but you can continue to provide and distribute other types of apps on the App Store.
As part of the current Apple purge, they were according to the server MacRumors applications that did not have much to do with gambling were also removed from the App Store. Most of the apps were removed not only from the Chinese App Store, but from App Stores around the world. Apple made the drastic move after being criticized by Chinese media for allowing the distribution of gambling games and spam messages through the App Store and iMessage. Apple worked in cooperation with Chinese operators to eliminate spam.
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It is not the first time that the Cupertino giant has adapted to the demands of the Chinese government. For example, Apple removed VPN applications from the Chinese App Store last July, and The New York Times application six months ago. "We'd rather not remove any apps, but just like in other countries, we have to respect local laws," Apple CEO Tim Cook said last year.
