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Comment by iancarroll | Hacker News Reader

Even in mainland China, where iOS does have a large amount of changes to comply with local regulations, Apple does not pre-install any apps from anyone.

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China doesn't require pre-installed apps but the Chinese government require all data processing and storage to be conducted within China with complete source code access.

India chose to back off on data sovereignty [0] because it would have had a side effect of making Indian IT Offshoring less competitive plus to help make negotiating a US-India BTA easier [1].

[0] - https://verfassungsblog.de/cross-border-data-flows-and-india...

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-25/us-seeks-...

I don't think there is any reason to assume they would allow forced code execution just because they allow data residency for mainland accounts. And unfortunately, China is likely a much larger and more profitable consumer market than India - presumably they can still export phones produced inside India without this.

> making Indian IT Offshoring less competitive

So does a security backdoor in every mobile device used by said Indian offshoring staff.

Most people in China install Wechat by choice, anyway

This is an interesting point. Is there anyone in mainland china that does do not install WeChat plus AliPay installed? It is hard to live without it! Literally, you can buy a kilo of veg from a wet market stall and pay with AliPay.

>Even in mainland China [..] Apple does not pre-install any apps from anyone.

That's because China has no regulation obliging them to do so.

China takes the other, more comprehensive, route to privacy invasion. Sucking up every bit of data at the router.

The GFW is certainly looking for traffic to block, but it is not really going to invade much privacy, as it cannot decrypt anything using HTTPS/TLS.

GFW does indeed have man in the middle capabilities per the recent leaks of Geedge tech used in it. Your laptop might throw a warning for the fake signed cert, but devices in China that trust Chinese root CAs would not.

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