> ironically, most of these companies are out of China
Of the three companies named:
- Google's user-facing services (search, email, app store, docs, ...) are blocked, but Google Ads (which are censored) and Android (which comes without any content that would require censorship) are still sold.
- Microsoft: I'm not aware of any of their products being unavailable. Windows is the dominant desktop operating system in China, and I'd be surprised if the app store wasn't censored. Bing search results are definitely censored (they tell you so at the bottom of the page).
- Amazon isn't selling much that could run afoul of censorship, except possibly books (remember when Amazon used to be an online bookstore?) but in China their market is mostly targeted at the niche of high-end imported goods. (Note the country-of-origin indicators on https://www.amazon.cn/ )
Worse than this, and to the point of this post - you can’t offer comms service in China unless it has a way to be snooped by government. So some comm services like Skype have to offer a separate app, just for China, which affects all messages sent and received by users of this version of the app, even if it comes from a regular app.
I was telling my friends who moved from China and kept their iPhones, to just buy a new one... just in case...
Google doesn't certify devices in the Chinese market which run Android. Android is open source. Devices made for the domestic Chinese market run versions of Android created by the manufacturers and lack Google apps and services.
The majority of Android phones manufactured in China are not intended for the domestic market but are exported, and do come with Google apps and services, which Google licenses to the manufacturers.
"Brain test game was deleted from the Chinese App Store".
These are just changes to the app catalog, what reason do we have to believe that a bunch of brain training apps being dropped or withdrawn is evidence of censorship? Has any of this been verified with the App publishers?
