China hits 836M 4G users as Apple faces app battles with Chinese government

The world’s largest LTE network keeps growing. The Chinese government announced today that the country now has 836M 4G users.

China had a total of 836 million 4G network users as of the end of March, up from 770 million three months ago, figures from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) showed Wednesday.

Average data use has also increased by more than 25% over the same quarter last year, now sitting at 1.28Gb per month.

The growth underlines the opportunities for Apple in app sales and services as well as hardware sales, but the company has faced some road-bumps along the way. The company has seen its iBooks and iTunes Movie services temporarily shutdown by the government, was forced to remove the New York Times apps from iTunes and is currently facing pressure to ‘tighten checks’ on live-streaming apps.

Apple is investing heavily in China, recently revealing that it will  be investing more than half a billion dollars in R&D in the country. China is already a bigger market than the USA for app sales.