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In the official notice shared with the media, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) says it has "received many complaints from various sources including several reports about the misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users' data in an unauthorised manner to servers which have locations outside India." The ministry, as well as the cybersecurity team CERT-In, received recommendations of apps to be banned from various agencies. The notice says the banned apps will now be "disallowed" from mobile and non-mobile, internet-enabled devices.
Many of the 59 Chinese apps banned in India are available to download from Google's Play Store for Android phones and Apple's App Store for iPhones and iPads. People who already have some of these apps on their phones should be able to use them; however, whether the government stops their functioning altogether remains to be seen.
Among the list of banned Chinese apps, the popular apps include TikTok, CamScanner, ShareIt, Helo, Likee, Xender, UC Browser, Clash of Kings, ES File Explorer, DU Cleaner, Clean Master, and Mobile Legends. Interestingly, Tencent's WeChat has been banned under the new order but the same company's PUBG — inarguably the most popular smartphone game in India — has not been included in the list.
This official ban comes 10 days after intelligence agencies reportedly shared a list of 52 apps of Chinese origin that posed a security threat. At the time, it was reported that the intelligence agencies told the government that these apps were extracting user data to foreign servers and that the agencies had asked the government to either ban these apps or advise users against them.