Microsoft Orders China Staff to Use iPhones for Work and Drop Android

bloomberg.com

36 points·jmsflknr··6 comments

> Microsoft has chosen to block access from those devices to its corporate resources because they lack Google’s mobile services in the country, the message said.

Basically the companies internal apps require Google play services, which don't work properly in China.

They don't work properly due to being blocked by the Chinese government due to a dispute stemming from cyberattack by China on Google in ~2012.

Buying everyone an iPhone at the cost of presumably $Millions seems like an expensive workaround.

How secure are the Chinese versions of whatever central services iPhones connect to in China? And do iPhones require any analogue of Google Play Services in the first place?

Apple has different servers for China and enforces whatever rules was dictated by CCP. Google simply refused to accept that and stayed out of the country.

The Chinese Android-ish phones are basically doing whatever CCP believes is best for you

They don't require Google Play Services.

They require the Google Play Store to distribute apps. Even Microsoft Intune has no options to simply deploy apps directly (by taking the installer permission) but instead has you provide store urls.

I imagine they had employees side loading the apk if they were using android.

Android in China is a very very different Android from what the west is used to.

If their Authenticator and Identity Pass app are stuck to Google Play Services, it's surely more risk adverse to give all chinese employees iPhones than to rewrite those apps to take into account the very large amount of OEM SDKs and secondary platform/ecosystem SDKs just to get push notifications everywhere.

https://archive.ph/aecjP

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