As the government of India issued a ban on 59 Chinese apps and this moves comes because of the ongoing Indo-China border tension. Now the users are concerned about another important factor is what would happen to the apps for all those users that have already installed them.
With TikTok, UC Browser, Shein, Shareit, WeChat and the likes being banned from Indian app stores, what this also means is that none of these apps would receive any developer support in India. As a result, users who have already downloaded these apps would not be able to access app downloads either.
What will happen to app already installed?
- As soon as the Google (Android) and Apple receive copies of the government order, the 59 apps banned will be removed from Google Play Store as well as iOS App Store.
- Government officials are already in talks with Indian internet service providers (ISPs) and telecom service providers (TSPs) to block all data traffic with these apps.
- This means that once the procedure is completed, these apps will become non-functional by default.
Previously, when an app would be banned from a region, it would still remain functional if it did not depend on data. While this would hold true for these apps too, since they would no longer be able to access data in the Indian networks, they would be as good as inoperable. However, if a user moves out of Indian network space to countries where these apps are still legally operational, they may be able to use these services once again.
What are the alternatives available to the banned apps?
There are plenty of alternative apps to the Chinese one on both – Google Play Store and Apple’s iOS App Store – so users need not worry about the quality. For instance, for alternative browsers, Google Chrome is among the best-rated ones. For scanning documents, users can easily shift to Google Drive or Adobe Scan etc, instead of CamScanner.
