Apple Appears To Have Deactivated News App in China

It is also speculated that the app may reappear in the market and ban has more to do with Apple figuring out delivery of new content than China’s media policies.

Even articles saved by those who are too fearful of the world to venture outside the walled garden for their news have been blocked.

It appears Apple is choosing to outright block its news app in China rather than implement a system to censor stories that would earn it the ire of Beijing.

“What worries me, is that the mechanism Apple uses to disable the News app and Apple Maps uses the location of the user to change the behavior of their device without their permission, even if the location service is disabled in the privacy settings”, Salibra complained, emphasizing the above phrases and words accordingly. It’s unclear whether Apple will eventually go down that path-either by using actual people to censor the feeds that Apple News pulls in, or by deploying a few kind of digital helper that prohibits articles with certain words (or subjects) from being displayed. “News isn’t supported in your current region”, the report says.

For now, Apple seems to be avoiding the problem by completely disabling the service for users in China.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was among many tech leaders, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who met with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a visit to the U.S. last month.

As Apple did not publicize this, it was a developer who first spotted this issue.

It was discovered by Larry Salibra and others that Apple has been disabling its Apple News Service in China. That Apple has little choice doesn’t make it any less creepy or outrageous.

The Apple News feed now shows an error message stating: “Can’t refresh right now”. Google famously ran afoul of the Chinese government in 2010 after sustaining a state-sponsored hacking attack on its Windows computers and was effectively kicked out of the country.