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Google removes Remove China Apps, which promised to help users rid their smartphones of Chinese apps, from the Play Store; the app had 4.7M downloads in India — Remove China Apps reached top of Play Store in India before it was ousted on Tuesday — Google intervened on Tuesday after millions …
Facebook and PayPal have made investments in GoJek, joining Google and Tencent among other high-profile technology firms that have backed the five-year-old Southeast Asian ride-hailing firm that also offers food delivery and mobile payments.
Facebook, for which it is the first investment in an Indonesia-based firm, and PayPal did not disclose the size of their checks. GoJek told TechCrunch that Facebook and PayPal were participating in its ongoing financing round, which brings it total raise-to-date to over $3 billion.
For Facebook, which in April invested in India’s top telecom operator Reliance Jio Platforms, backing GoJek unlocks a similar opportunity: Helping millions of small businesses.
Matt Idema, chief operating officer at WhatsApp, said the company will work with “indispensable” service GoJek to “bring millions of small businesses and the customers they serve into the largest digital economy in Southeast Asia.”
“The majority of small businesses in Indonesia rely on cash to operate due to the country’s large unbanked population. Digital payments are safer than cash, both for businesses and customers. And digital payments help more people participate in the economy and give businesses access to credit which is crucial for business growth,” he wrote in a blog post.
PayPal, which last year invested in money lender Tala ahead of the startup’s launch in India, said the commercial partnership will enable the global payments giant to “significantly grow” its scope and scale in Southeast Asia.
“This new relationship is another positive step in our journey towards becoming the worldwide payments partner of choice, and helping to fuel global commerce by connecting the world’s leading marketplaces and payment networks,” PayPal said in a statement.
GoJek, which disclosed it had raised $1.2 billion in March to employees and was valued at about $10 billion, said it has amassed over 170 million users in Southeast Asia. In March, the company, which competes with Singapore-headquartered Grab, said it had raised nearly $3 billion over the years.
“We have the opportunity to achieve something truly unique as we aim to help more businesses to digitise and ensure that many millions more consumers are enjoying the benefits that the digital economy can bring,” said Andre Soelistyo, who was appointed as co-chief executive of GoJek last year, in a statement. Gojek founder Nadiem Makarim resigns his top job at the firm to join Indonesian cabinet in October last year.
More to follow…
Remove China Apps, an app that gained popularity in India in recent weeks and did exactly what its name suggests, has been pulled from the Play Store.
The top trending app in India, which was downloaded more than 5 million times since late May and enabled users to detect and easily delete apps developed by Chinese firms, was pulled from Android’s marquee app store for violating Google Play Store’s Deceptive Behaviour Policy, TechCrunch has learned.
Under this policy an app on Google Play Store cannot make changes to a user’s device settings, or features outside of the app without the user’s knowledge and consent, and not it can encourage or incentivize users into removing or disabling third-party apps.
The app, developed by Indian firm OneTouch AppLabs, gained popularity in India in part because of a growing anti-China sentiment among many citizens as tension between the world’s two most populous nations has escalated in recent days over a Himalayan border dispute.
Several Indian celebrities in recent days have backed the idea of deleting Chinese apps. Yoga guru Baba Ramdev tweeted a video over the weekend that showed him deleting several apps that had affiliation with China.
Responding to a tweet from an Indian actor deleting TikTok from his phone, Nupur Sharma, a spokeswoman for India’s ruling party BJP, said it was “great to see concerned citizens setting an example” and “we ought to hit them where it hurts most.”
Citing an industry source, Chinese state-run Global Times news outlet reported on Tuesday that if the Indian government allows the “irrational anti-China sentiment” to continue it risks ruining bilateral relations that is “likely to draw tit-for-tat punishment from Beijing.”
The report added that some users in China ridiculed Remove China Apps and urged Indians to “throw away” their smartphones, referring to Chinese smartphone makers’ dominance in India’s smartphone market.
If the sentiment from India persists, it could mean bad news for several Chinese firms such as ByteDance and UC Browser that count India as their biggest overseas market. TikTok, which weeks ago was grappling with content moderation efforts in India, sparked a new debate over the weekend after a popular creator claimed that a video she posted on TikTok was pulled by the Chinese firm.
The video was critical of the Chinese government, she said. In a statement to TechCrunch, a TikTok spokesperson said the platform welcomes diversity of users and viewpoints and said it had implemented a more rigorous review process and reinstated the video.
In April, India amended its foreign direct investment policy to enforce tougher scrutiny on Chinese investors looking to cut checks to firms in the world’s second largest internet market. New Delhi, which maintains a similar stand for investors from several other neighboring nations, said the measure was introduced to “curb the opportunistic takeover” of Indian firms going through distress because of the global pandemic.
India’s Prime Minister Modi has also aggressively promoted the idea of boycotting goods made by foreign firms and advised the nation’s 1.3 billion citizens to look for local alternatives as part of his push to make India “self-reliant” and revive the slowing economy.
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The app’s name says it all: Remove China Apps.
Developed by a self-proclaimed “Indian startup” named OneTouch AppLabs, Remove China Apps crossed 1 million downloads within 10 days of launch in May. Its overnight success came amid rising China-Indian tensions over the countries’ disputed border in the Himalayas.
Most of the app’s installs are found in India, although analytics data from App Annie shows that it has been gaining momentum in Australia in the last few days, rising to No.5 among Android tools apps.
The app is straightforward to use: Click scan and it will either congratulates one on having no Chinese apps or displays a list of those that are determined to be of Chinese origin — like TikTok.
India is one of the top overseas destinations for Chinese tech companies. Xiaomi and Oppo have dominated mobile sales there for some time and a significant number of top Android apps in the country are developed by Chinese companies, as my former colleague Jon Russell acutely pointed out.
On Android, Remove China Apps has a near-perfect 4.9 out of 5 stars rating from nearly 180,000 reviews. It claims it can identify an app’s country of origin based on market research, while it does not guarantee the result’s accuracy. It leaves the choice to users to remove the apps it flags, saying it provides the service for non-commercial purposes.
Despite its instant popularity, the app’s background is cryptic. The company website is a simple WordPress-based site and Remove China Apps is, in its own word, its first product. This is an underwhelming achievement in contrast to its grandiose statement claiming it has “experience of 8+ years in mobile and web application design, development and management.”
It’s also unclear how the developer defines “China apps.” For instance, will apps developed by overseas Chinese sound an alarm? How about a Chinese subsidiary that operates a fully localized team abroad? User tests show that it flags the U.S. video conferencing giant Zoom. Does the fact that its founder Eric Yuan, an American citizen born in China, makes Zoom a “China app”? Meanwhile, it misses some obvious targets, like Chinese apps that come bundled with smartphones.
As of the writing, we haven’t heard back from the company regarding the methodologies it uses to spot “China apps.” It does, however, disclose online what information it collects from users, including one’s device model, the language set for the device system, the device manufacturer and app-specific information such as the version code of apps, the version name of apps, and the package name of apps.
The app has prompted heated debate among Chinese developers targeting international markets. Baijing, or Beluga Whale, a popular online community for China’s app exporters, wrote (in Chinese) that Remove China Apps is “a form of market disruption” and called on Chinese developers to report the app to Google.
Many are wary of rising anti-China sentiment overseas. As the founder of a major app exporter said to me: “I think what happens in India will happen in other countries in the future, so this is a long-term impact that should factor into Chinese developers’ calculation.”
There’s perhaps some assurance for Chinese developers. While users of the detection app applaud its mission, a few complain that there are no immediate replacements of certain Chinese apps. One of the top indigenous alternatives recommended by users is Jio Platforms, the well-funded Reliance subsidiary that operates a wide range of mobile apps.
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PlayStation gamers, there is some bad news for you. The PS5 event scheduled for June 4 has been postponed. On the official PlayStation Blog, Sony has said, “We have decided to postpone the PlayStation 5 event scheduled for June 4. While we understand gamers worldwide are excited to see PS5 games, we do not feel that right now is a time for celebration and for now, we want to stand back and allow more important voices to be heard.” PlayStation Twitter handle has also tweeted the same update. The PS5 reveal is a big deal for Sony but considering the current unrest in the US, Sony has decided to let go of the spotlight till things settle down.
The June 4 event was meant to showcase games launching for the PS4. It was speculated that we could get a glimpse of the new console but it was unlikely as Sony has said that this was the first in a series of events planned to showcase the PS5.
The beginning of June is usually when E3 (Electronics Entertainment Expo) kicks off. Due to the COVID-9 pandemic, however, the event has been cancelled. The surprising thing is that Sony announced early on that it wouldn’t participate in E3 this year and yet they were the first set to showcase games for the console at the time when E3 usually takes place.
While we haven’t seen the PS5 console, we have seen the new DualSense controller that players will get with the console. You can check out details of the controller here. Microsoft, on the other hand, has shown off the design and interior of the Xbox Series X and also had a gameplay reveal event to showcase games for the upcoming console. While Microsoft has said that all first-party games releasing for the first 2 years on the Series X will be playable on the Xbox One family of devices Sony has said that they will be looking forward to the PS5 and games launching for that system will take advantage of its capabilities.
In other Sony news, the Last of Us Part 2, one of the PlayStation's highly anticipated games is around the corner and you can read more about the game here.
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