China apps bypass ban; K’taka may draft new gaming law

February 16, 2022 India Crime & Legal

Many of the 224 China-linked apps that India has banned since June 2020 continue to operate in India, according to industry insiders and privacy experts. Some of these are registered in countries such as the US, Singapore and even India to evade bans.

Several mobile apps, backed by global tech majors, that have been banned by India in recent years continue to operate in the country, industry members and privacy experts told us.

The union government recently banned 54 Chinese apps, some of which are thought to be rebranded avatars of apps banned in 2020. India has so far banned around 224 Chinese apps — including popular ones like TikTok, Shareit and WeChat – since June 2020.

For instance? Bigo Live, which was among the first apps to be banned, continues to operate in India with a sizeable number of users. While it is not available for download on Google’s Play Store, users can easily install it with an APK file.

Sources also told us that several employees of Bigo and another app, Likee, have been moved to new entities such as Tiki mobile app, which is a Likee clone. The app, which is a platform for short videos, has over 50 million downloads on the Play Store.

Bytedance apps: A little before its flagship app TikTok was banned in India, ByteDance shut down its Vigo Video and Helo apps in the Indian market. However, Byte Dance still operates the editing app CapCut in India, which has over 10 million downloads on the Play Store.