China and Apple – a love-hate relationship. With 15 percent, the US technology giant makes a significant part of its sales in the Middle Kingdom, and a large part of the production takes place here.
But the US company and the authoritarian Chinese regime clash over and over again. Often with a negative outcome for the company that has apples in its logo and often has less influence in China.
But the company probably hasn’t bowed to the Chinese regime as openly as it has in recent weeks. Apple recently released a software update for its iPhones that explicitly restricts Airdrop functionality for Chinese devices. That’s what Bloomberg and The Guardian are reporting.
Why Airdrop?
The function is designed to exchange content between two or more Apple devices. Airdrop is based on its own network and therefore works without an internet connection. This is exactly China’s problem. Because the regime controls exactly who puts what on the internet.
That’s why many Chinese have used the airdrop function to distribute pictures and videos of the protests during demonstrations against the ongoing Covid restrictions, writes Spiegel Online. Tracing the source of the shared data is much more difficult. Shared images do not end on web servers, they remain on users’ devices.
Here too, China has now put pressure on Apple to maintain control, asking the US company to limit the Airdrop.
After the update, you need to re-enable the airdrop function on Chinese iPhones every ten minutes. Otherwise, no files can be imported. Previously, you could leave the Airdrop function open in China and receive content from nearby Apple users.
Additional restrictions on human rights
For decades, authoritarian leadership in China has restricted its citizens’ freedom of expression and opinion. For example, there is neither Instagram nor YouTube as we know it in Europe. Only fully monitored platforms and social media are available.
The regime goes further with the so-called “One Cent Army”. The authoritarian regime pays an “army” of about 300,000 a penny each when it reports and deletes posts critical of the regime from the internet. So the current development fits seamlessly into the gradual liquidation of human rights in the Middle Kingdom. But what is new is that big western companies are there to help.
Will there be a worldwide restriction?
Apple has not publicly announced the new restriction after the software update. He said only that the update will fix bugs and close security vulnerabilities. In other words, the Chinese did not know that with the update, their smartphones would lose an important function.
It is not yet clear whether the functionality will also be restricted in other parts of the world in the future. Apple did not want to give any information about this.