Technology giant Apple announced on Monday that its Chinese app store was cleared from many gambling-related apps amid tight scrutiny measures by China over trade tensions between Beijing and Washington.
A total of 25,000 apps were announced to be removed by the tech company over suspicion of facilitating illegal lotteries and gambling, a news report said.
“Reporters have discovered even after the Apple company’s large-scale repairs, loopholes still exist,” said CCTV anchor Chang Xiao.
As per the report last month by CCTV, the US company was accused of availing a platform for illegal gambling applications to find space.
“We have already removed many apps and developers for trying to distribute illegal gambling apps on our App Store, and we are vigilant in our efforts to find these and stop them from being on the App Store,” the company said in a statement.
As the heated exchanges increased between Beijing and Washington, the state media in China has probed for irregularities in operations of Apple in China.
As per another state media report which was broadcasted last month, Apple was accused of not filtering messages sent through its iMessage service adequately.
The app store did not take any major steps for clearance of such illegal apps to minimize the slamming by CCTV.
“With the help of the Apple platform, the (gambling app operators) can directly profit,” a law professor said in the latest CCTV talks, while alleging that the responsibility was upon Apple for not only removing the apps from the store but also to deny access for those phones which have already downloaded the applications.
Chinese people form a major chunk of Apple’s markets which form nearly 20 percent of its total revenue last year.
Apple has taken many issues for redressal to make the Chinese regulators satisfied which also includes the transferring of control of Chinese user data to a state-owned company in summer this year.
The step was slammed by many rights groups with even users from the country worrying over the issue of their privacy.
Apart from that, Apple dissatisfied many rights groups last year during its restriction of customers from China to access the company’s Virtual Private Networks which helped users to circumvent Great Firewall installed by China and also to gain access to many blocked websites like Twitter, Facebook and The New York Times.
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