The Chinese version of the Apple App Store has been looking at some serious cleaning for the last few months. Since the Chinese App Store is one of the biggest app markets for Apple, they have to comply with the Chinese government and remove any apps which are not allowed as per the rules. Apple has been purging and removing a lot of apps from their App Store for the last few months and recently, they have reported one of the biggest single-day surges from the Chinese App Store.
It has been reported that Apple removed almost 39,000 games from its Chinese store in just a single day. The apps which run without a government license in China are not allowed to be hosted on the Apple App Store. The reports came in from Reuters where they estimated that a total of 30,000 apps from the Chinese app store had been removed by the end of June. Only 74 of the top 1,500 paid games remain after yesterday’s purge, and among the games affected are Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Identity and NBA 2K20.
The major problem has been for apps under the gaming category, which are not allowed to work without a government license. As per the rules, app developers have to get the Chinese ISBN number from the government—a process that is nigh impossible unless foreign developers team up with a Chinese publisher before launch. This will lead to an estimated loss of $340 million in sales for Apple as most of the games on its platform are already licensed.