• @[email protected]
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    4710 months ago

    Four facts to consider:

    1. Huawei had no problems at all selling their phones in China. They were already 100% google-less before the ban, and after the ban it was the “patriot choice” to get their phones

    2. iPhones are banned for people who are working for the Chinese government; there’s a fear campaign that says that the American government can hack them

    3. The Chinese iPhone app store is now a restricted list of carefully whitelisted apps from the Chinese government, and in order to be whitelisted the app must be published by a developer that has a presence in China with a specific content license. So now the iPhone is a dumb phone that can run tencent/Alibaba/bytedance/pinduoduo apps. If you’re thinking of an iPhone app, it’s probably unavailable in China. At least with android you can sideload whatever you want (and often in the rom there’s a shim that allows to unofficially install the Google play store and services), but with the iPhone all you can get is those few apps.

    4. You can get similar build quality for a quarter or a third of the price. There are no carrier discounts, you need to pay the full price, which in cities that are not Shanghai are several months of salary. And if you need to show that you’re worth, it’s much better to take a foldable. I saw many women with a zflip worn like a necklace or a zfold worn like a bag

    Seen those four reasons, there’s no surprises iphone isn’t the “default” option like in the US

    • @[email protected]
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      810 months ago

      Huawei had no problems at all selling their phones in China. They were already 100% google-less before the ban

      Wat? Weren’t they running Android with Google Services?

      iPhones are banned for people who are working for the Chinese government; there’s a fear campaign that says that the American government can hack them

      After Snowden, nobody can seriously sit there and believe the USA doesn’t have access.

      CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

      • @[email protected]
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        610 months ago

        No, Google Is completely blocked in china so it wouldn’t make sense to pay a license for their play services

        Fun fact: I had to hard reset my pixel in china and I had trouble to even pass the welcome screen as it would say that the wifi network wasn’t working, because they ping a Google server

          • @[email protected]
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            710 months ago

            where do you live?? Google play was banned in China in 2010. That’s NINE years before huawei was banned in the rest of the world. It changed absolutely nothing for them, in the chinese market.

            Every single manufacturer, including Samsung, when targeting the chinese market, they don’t include any google service

            It’s like if a vegan gets banned from mcdonalds. “Oh no, anyway”, he’s going to say