One month from now Android fans are planned to see some famous applications get removed from the Google Play Store. In total 8 Android apps are set to be brought down from the Play Store in February, with one of these applications downloaded over a billion times – and others downloaded more than 100 million times. Among the apps set to be removed is CamScanner – which has a 4.7 average Play Store rating dependent on more than 3 million reviews.
These famous Android apps aren’t being taken out from the Play Store for all clients, however, rather are set to be delisted from the US version of the Google app marketplace.
That is because of another executive order that active President Donald Trump has signed during his last weeks in office.
As detailed by Android Police, Trump has prohibited “transactions” with various Chinese-made apps by any individual in the US.
The Android-centric website noticed this would “effectively ban” these applications from both the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
The executive order comes into impact on February 19 – which is close to 30 days after Trump will be supplanted by President-elect Joe Biden.
The order says: “The United States has assessed that several Chinese connected software applications automatically capture vast swaths of information from millions of users in the United States, including sensitive personally identifiable information and private information, which would allow the PRC and CCP access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.”
The applications being referred to that are influenced by this order are Alipay, CamScanner, QQ Wallet, SHAREit, Tencent QQ, VMate, WeChat Pay, and WPS Office.
During his time in office Trump has pursued various Chinese tech goliaths, with TikTok and WeChat previously approached with boycotts.
Both of these app bans failed to materialize, in any case, the Trump administration has set huge tension on cell phone creator Huawei.
In 2018 Huawei was put on the US Entity trade blacklist, which implies the P40 Pro creators couldn’t have crucial Google apps and services installed on their phones straight out of the box.
While a year ago the White House put further pressure on Huawei by supporting sanctions that implied any firm that provided parts that utilized any sort of US-made tech needed to get approval to supply Huawei.
These even influenced products made outside of the US, for example, crucial display parts made by Samsung and even Huawei’s own Kirin chips.
Huawei has needed to do a lot of adapting in the face of these sanctions, proceeding to make their own operating system – HarmonyOS – which will debut this year and adversary Android.
