Recently, Apple increased the price of Apps, Games on the App Store in India, Indonesia. Now, it is turning the attention towards China. Despite Apple fixing deadlines and extending them, publishers didn’t submit a license on time. This has led to the company removing thousands of Apps including Games from its China App Store.
According to a Reuters report, Apple has removed 39,000 games from the China App Store. This move comes as the company’s already-extended deadline for obtaining a License comes to an end today. For the unware, Apple issued guidelines to publishers for submitting a License number from the Chinese Government.
This is reportedly for allowing users to do in-app purchases on the App Store. The deadline, which initially was on June-end got extended to Dec. 31 which is today. Anyway, apart from games, Apple has also removed other apps bringing the overall tally to more than 46,000.
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Besides, some of the biggies like Ubisoft‘s Assassin’s Creed Identity and NBA 2K20 also seem to have affected in this sweep. In fact, only 74 of the 1,500 top-grossing games made the cut according to Qimai. While the move could be to be on good terms with regulators of China who hunt unlicensed content, experts also feel it would flip coins for Apple.
Previously, the company came under a lot of criticism for allowing a crowdsourced police activity App on its App store amidst Hong Kong Protests in 2019. More drama unfolded during the initial days of the US – WeChat ban controversy as well. Anyway, analysts say that such stringent measures would make overseas developers look for alternate ad-supported platforms which won’t be good news for the Cupertino giant.
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