Google Takes Down ‘Remove China Apps’ from its Play Store and Indians Want it Back up

Days after crossing millions of downloads in India, the popular Google Play Store app “Remove China Apps” has been taken down by the tech giant.

The app gained popularity in the last couple of weeks amid the apparent rising tensions between the Chinese and Indian troops along the Line of Actual Control or LAC. Following this #BoycottChina #BoycottChineseApps began trending on social media and the calls for giving up Chinese products were made by many including Sonam Wangchuk, whose work inspired Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 3 Idiots.

But now Google has taken it down from its app store. This was conveyed in a tweet by the Jaipur-based app developer “One Touch AppLabs” on Wednesday.

“Dear Friends, Google has suspended our #RemoveChinaApps from google play store. Thank you all for your support in past 2 weeks.

“You Are Awesome”,” the account wrote.

This was also pointed out by several Twitter users. Google suspends applications that violate its Play Store’s policies. A report in Tech Crunch said the app was suspended as it violated Google Play Store’s Deceptive Behaviour Policy. The report further noted that under such a policy, the app cannot make changes to the user’s device settings or features outside the app without the user’s knowledge and consent nor it could “encourage” the app to remove or disable third-party apps.

Notably, Mitron App, India’s answer to TikTok, was earlier suspended for violating the Spam and Minimum Functionality developer policies under the Google Play Store, reported CNBC-TV18.

While several others shared apk links to get access to the app. As the name suggests, “Remove China Apps” did exactly what it was intended to do.

Once you opened the app, it scanned the apps on your device for their China origin and gave you an option to select and delete them as per your will.

The app gained popularity in the days that followed and Indians who used the app to dump out Chinese apps, shared screenshots on Twitter.