WeChat

After Apple warned the White House about the ‘severe’ implications of an overly broad WeChat ban, it now seems the iPhone maker may be safe from the worst-case scenario. But a business group has said that US firms doing business with China could still face ‘enormous negative impact’ …

Multiple reports suggest that what could have been a massive threat to iPhone sales has now been resolved.

One interpretation of an executive order by President Trump would have banned Apple from doing any business with WeChat owner Tencent, even in China. It was calculated that this could have cost Apple as much as 30% of its global iPhone revenue …

TikTok owner ByteDance, and an alliance representing WeChat users, are both taking legal action to challenge the Trump app bans. Trump signed executive orders banning both TikTik and WeChat from the US.

Both are arguing that the executive orders are illegal, each claiming the bans violate constitutional rights …

Apple was among more than a dozen US companies to warn the Trump administration about the severe implications of banning WeChat from their platforms. President Trump is seeking to ban the app due to national security concerns, and during a press conference today, he offered a “rebuttal” to Apple’s argument.

A huge Chinese survey with more than 1.2 million responses shows that 95% of Chinese iPhone owners would switch from Apple to another smartphone brand, rather than give up WeChat. The survey follows an executive order by Donald Trump banning US companies from transactions with WeChat owner Tencent.

iPhones without WeChat in China would be turned into “expensive electronic trash”…

Apple is one of more than a dozen US companies who this week warned the Trump administration about the implications of banning WeChat from their platforms. The warning was given during a conference call on Tuesday.

Disney, Ford, Intel, Morgan Stanley, UPS and Walmart were also among those to inform the White House that the consequences for US companies could be ‘severe’ …

A report earlier today cited a potentially huge WeChat threat to the future of the iPhone in China. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is concerned that the Trump administration could force Apple to remove the WeChat app not just from the US App Store, but globally.

Kuo warned that this could see a massive 30% reduction in global iPhone sales, and if that sounds hyperbolic, it’s likely not …

The Trump executive order banning US companies from having a business relationship with WeChat has many ramifications, and analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is concerned that the hit to iPhone sales will be significant.

If the order is implemented in full, it would see WeChat being removed from the App Store worldwide. WeChat is a critically important app for the Chinese market and if it’s no longer available on iOS, iPhone sales could decline by as much as 30%.

Following this week’s announcement that TikTok and other Chinese apps like WeChat would be banned from the United States, Donald Trump today signed an executive order to officially ban transactions with Chinese companies ByteDance and Tencent.

News broke at the end of last week that President Trump was set to ban TikTok and force the sale of its US operations. Microsoft was named as an interested party but Trump didn’t like the idea initially. Now it looks like Trump may be open to entertaining a Microsoft acquisition after all while WeChat has been named as another Chinese app threatened to be banned.

Analysts say that an update to China’s WeChat platform could have ‘serious ramifications’ for both iPhone sales and Services income, further reducing the value of the Apple ecosystem in the country. One analyst said the update effectively creates a ‘WeChat home screen’ as an alternative to the iOS one.

Apple’s ecosystem is normally a key part of its appeal, but as we’ve discussed on more than one occasion, that’s a much weaker argument for buying an iPhone in China. The reason? The WeChat platform comes close to replacing the operating system on Chinese phones …

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New reports from The New York Times detail some of the mind-boggling statistics and gravity that the sensationally popular WeChat messaging app yields across China.

In a separate report, the paper details a government led initiative to silence Chinese Twitter users via family related threats to even go so far as physically detaining violators.

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Stolen Apple IDs have led to money being stolen from Alipay and WeChat Pay, China’s top mobile payment apps. The thefts took place from people who had their AliPay accounts linked to their Apple ID as a payment method …

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Apple is courting controversy in China by announcing that it will take a cut of donations sent to content creators via social media apps in the future …

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A new report French website iGen indicates that France could be seeing an Apple Pay announcement in as early as the first half of this year. While Apple announced the UnionPay partnership for China two months ago, there has yet to be any signs that other additional countries outside the US and UK (aside from Australia and Canada’s American Express arrangement) would be seeing Apple Pay any time soon. Other reports believe that China could be seeing Apple Pay, which is promised to go live in early 2016, activated as soon as this Thursday at 5 AM (Beijing time).

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Apple has named the top 25 apps infected by the XcodeGhost malware, stating that “the number of impacted users drops significantly” for other compromised apps. Most security researchers now agree that the total number of infected apps is in or around four figures, with many of them still present in China’s App Store … 
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Update 1: The list of apps has now been updated with apps identified by Dutch security company Fox-IT. The company is reporting seeing malware traffic from the apps in Europe.

Update 2: Rovio has advised that only the version of Angry Birds 2 in the Chinese App Store was affected.

I wish to clarify that Rovio can confirm that only the Chinese build of Angry Birds 2 — available only on the App Store in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau — is vulnerable to the security issue. All other builds of Angry Birds 2 available in other countries are completely safe and secure. An update of Angry Birds 2 for customers in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau that fixes the issue is coming very shortly.

After yesterday’s revelation that hundreds of iOS apps on the App Store had been infected by malware, security company Palo Alto Networks has posted a list of some of the affected apps – which include Angry Birds 2.

The apps were infected by a fake copy of Xcode dubbed XcodeGhost, unwittingly downloaded by Chinese developers in place of the real thing. It’s believed they downloaded the fake from local servers because it took too long to download the original from Apple’s own servers. It’s not yet known why Apple’s own checks did not detect the malware when apps were submitted to the App Store.

It’s been suggested that over 300 apps are infected, with 31 of them so far identified (list below) … 
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A week after IDC estimated worldwide Apple Watch Q2 sales of 3.6M units, a large Chinese app analytics company has reportedly measured more than 1M Watches in use in China. TalkingData has access to huge volumes of data as the apps it monitors include WeChat, which has more than half a billion active users, reports Business Insider … 
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