China To Require All Apps To Share Business Details in New Oversight Push

China will require all mobile app providers in the country to file business details with the government, its information ministry said, marking Beijing's latest effort to keep the industry on a tight leash. From a report: The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said late on Tuesday that apps without proper filings will be punished after the grace period that will end in March next year, a move that experts say would potentially restrict the number of apps and hit small developers hard. You Yunting, a lawyer with Shanghai-based DeBund Law Offices, said the order is effectively requiring approvals from the ministry. The new rule is primarily aimed at combating online fraud but it will impact on all apps in China, he said.

Rich Bishop, co-founder of app publishing firm AppInChina, said the new rule is also likely to affect foreign-based developers which have been able to publish their apps easily through Apple's App Store without showing any documentation to the Chinese government. Bishop said that in order to comply with the new rules, app developers now must either have a company in China or work with a local publisher.

Xi Jinping gets in touch with his inner girl

[gtall]

Xi Jinping, not being able to take any criticism, once again gets the parasites in the CCP to stick it to the people.

Re:Xi Jinping gets in touch with his inner girl

[BigFire]

He broke the oligarchy compact set down by Deng Xiaoping where reign of power will be rotated between various factions. Each faction is supposed to rule for 10 years and then moved onto the next faction. Shanghai faction had the first dip of power. This is followed by a somewhat central power. Xi Jinping is the Northern faction who went out of his way to purge any Shanghai or Southern faction from significant power. He's now chairman for life in practical sense. In this environment, you keep your heads down and do as you're told. Personal initiative is seen as a potential problem to be stamped out. The problem of course it that no man, no matter how supremely gifted can actually run a country as large as China. So CCP functionary do as they're told regardless of the consequence, because disobedience will be interpreted as disloyal.

Re:

[oumuamua]

Never heard of that before, any links to back it up?
It sucks Xi ended the 2 term limit, that is the first thing all dictators do. It is really hard to find unbiased articles on China. Western media is now full-cold-war negative bias and of course you can't trust articles from within China either. Here is one article that shows Xi's anti corruption campaign was in fact valid: https://www.modernchinastudies... [modernchinastudies.org]

Re:

[BigFire]

Every member of Politburo is corrupt one way or another. There's no way you can make it out of the regional politic without being corrupt. "Anti-corruption" is just a nice big stick those in power can use to purge their enemies.

No, this is not about fraud

[hdyoung]

Shutting down app fraud would actually be pretty easy, at least for the big players. And it absolutely doesn’t involve requiring every business to share every detail about their plans and strategic operations. All it involves is tightening up the entry requirements to an app store (there is literally no legit reason to have a thousand apps going into ios per day) and increasing the number of people on the team that vet the apps (cough up the $$$ and increase the team size beyond 15).

Just like literally everything else about the Chinese government, this is about control.

Re:

[TWX]

I donno, it sounds like it's a way of forcing new apps into the fold of the major companies that are under more strict State scrutiny. It'll mean that app developers have to be associated with these large monoliths and subject to meddling or even outright reporting.

Re:

[znrt]

it sounds like bullshit, frankly. the news is pretty vague as for the actual requirements. particularly jarring is this:

Rich Bishop, co-founder of app publishing firm AppInChina, said the new rule is also likely to affect foreign-based developers which have been able to publish their apps easily through Apple's App Store without showing any documentation to the Chinese government. Bishop said that in order to comply with the new rules, app developers now must either have a company in China or work with a local publisher.

which is funny because according to him (back in march 2023) these were the exact same requirements that were in place ... unless you paid him to do it:

IF YOU ARE GOING SOLO

If you are not using a service like AppInChina to publish your app on your behalf, you will also need the following items:

Power of Attorney Letter
Chinese Business Registration
Photocopy of Passport (Business registration holder)
Chinese SIM Card
Signed Individual App Store Development Statement/Claim Guarantee Letter
Please note that, for games, it is impossible to get a game license without being a Chinese entity. If you are not a Chinese company, or your company does not have a Chinese entity, then you will require a Chinese partner to publish your game.

https://www.appinchina.co/blog... [appinchina.co]

so this is total crap news with no serious information whatsoever, possibly even fake/ad news but i guess good enough to invoke all the china bashers in the funny and venerable parish of slashdot and go nut

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

You do have to give your business details to Apple and Google if you want to be in their app stores. The problem is they aren't in a very good position to validate those details, or take action of the app turns out to be fraudulent.

Look at the shitshow that is verified domain certificates. You were supposed to be able to pay extra to have a trusted vendor check out your company and confirm that you are the real Bank of XYZ and not some scammer. It never worked properly and all major browser vendors decided

Easy solution.

[rlwinm]

There is an easy solution: Don't do business in China. Sure it looks like a tempting market with over 1 billion people. But that's an illusion. You don't deal with Chinese consumers. You deal with the CCP. That's your "customer" when doing business there. So just skip out on that one customer.

Xioviet Union

[Tablizer]

You can't take a Xit without Xi logging your logs.

Reminds me of article 27 GDPR

[tepples]

China requiring foreign firms to pay a fee to do business in China reminds me of the European Union requiring foreign firms to pay a fee to do business in the Union.

Article 3 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [gdpr-info.eu] states that the regulation applies to any business outside the Union that knowingly handles data pertaining to users in the Union. Recital 23 [gdpr-info.eu] clarifies how to interpret "knowingly," and it appears that merely listing as an option in a drop-down list of ship to countries is enough.

Article [gdpr-info.eu]

Next in the news

[wakeboarder]

China installs cameras in every bathroom for more oversight

No Twitter in China

[MooseTick]

Since Twitter has no business plan or strategy, I guess they can't do business in China.

And who is the smart one here? China that keeps companies like Twitter out or the US that lets social networking companies manipulate the population 100x more subtly yet effectively than newspapers from the 19th century ever did. Which group of people and society are better off?