News content is a sensitive topic in China. The government exercises a significant degree of control over information sources so it is unsurprising that Apple would choose to not support News there. However, instead of simply being locked behind a hardware feature gate, Apple chose to disable it much more forcefully. If you enter China with a US iPhone (e.g. one purchased in the US from a US carrier or at a US Apple Store), using a US carrier, with your phone set to the US region, and with location services disabled for the News app, you will still receive this message upon opening News:
To accomplish this censorship Apple is using a form of location fingerprinting that is not available to normal applications on iOS. It works like this: despite the fact that your phone uses a SIM from a US carrier it must connect to a Chinese cellular network. Apple is using private APIs to identify that you are in mainland China based on the name of the underlying cellular network and blocking access to the News app. This information is not available via public APIs in iOS1 specifically to improve privacy for users.
This censorship occurs despite the fact that when in China a cell phone using a foreign SIM is not subject to the firewall restrictions (all traffic is tunneled back to your provider first), so Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al all work fine on a non-mainland China SIM even though you’re connected via China Mobile or China Unicom’s network.
I had no idea Apple went to such great lengths to please the totalitarian Chinese government. Fascinating, though.
I think it’s the beginning of the end of an apple. they are not innovative. they started to copy others ideas. previously it took them 12 years after removal of SJ to almost kill the company. now it will take a longer period of time, but it’s inevitable.
What would be the consequences to Apple and the west if they were to simply leave the Chinese market?
CaptainN-,
How much of that Chinese money actually makes it back into the Western economy, and not just to the few at the top who put their money into tax havens?
What about the consequences for the Chinese? They love their iPhones. And without them there would be no iPhones for anybody. The West needs more censorship (like live streaming murder) and the East needs less. So nobody can throw stones IMHO.
exactly, that would be the only effect if apple would stand against local laws. it certainly cannot change the regime policies.
Come on Thom, it’s a huge corporation, not a bunch of idealistic hippies (unfortunately?).
It’s either accomplish to local laws or be out of that market entirely. Blame the Chinese lawmakers.
But, don’t they think different or did they misspoke Orwellian
But it seems Apple went quite beyond what the law requires / what other companies are doing… It seems to very much want to have a cozy relationship with the Chinese regime.