China

Apple today launched a large-scale promotion in China offering special discounts for consumers who use Apple Pay, in the company's latest bid to counter the dominance of rival digital wallets in the country. Between July 18 and 24, Apple device owners who use the mobile payment system to make purchases in participating merchants across mainland China will receive concessions of up to 50...

Apple has announced it is setting up its first China data center in partnership with a local internet services company, in accordance with the country's new cybersecurity laws introduced last month. Apple told Reuters on Wednesday that the data center would be built in the southern province of Guizhou with data management firm Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry (GCBD) as part of a planned $1...

A popular virtual private network service has been forced to close in China on orders from the government, it emerged on Monday. Bloomberg reported that GreenVPN sent a notice to its customers saying it would end the service from July 1 after "receiving a notice from regulatory departments". VPNs route and encrypt internet traffic to servers outside of the country, making them popular with...

Apple updated its App Store Review Guidelines this week to indicate that developers may now sell virtual currencies in the form of in-app purchases to enable customers to "tip" content creators within apps. Like all other in-app purchases, Apple will now receive a 30 percent cut from the virtual currencies used for tipping. Tipping within apps is popular in China, where live-streaming...

Apple has told several Chinese social networking apps to disable their "tip" functions to comply with App Store rules, according to executives at WeChat and other companies. The tip functions in Chinese messaging platforms are free to use and allow people to send authors and other content creators monetary tips through transfers to mobile wallet accounts. However, according to The Wall Street...

Netflix has signed a licensing deal with a Beijing-based video platform in order to avoid regulatory restrictions and get its content into China's huge entertainment market (via The Hollywood Reporter). The streaming giant announced the news of its content agreement with iQiyi on Tuesday at the APOS industry conference in Bali, Indonesia. "China is an important market for obvious reasons; ...

Chinese mobile maker Xiaomi unveiled the Mi 6, its latest flagship smartphone, at a packed-out event in Beijing on Wednesday. The Mi 5's successor features curved "four-sided 3D glass" and a front that isn't bezel-free like the company's Mi MIX, but the phone does boast a lot of tech for a device that starts at 2499 RMB, or $360 – about half of what a base iPhone 7 goes for in China....

Apple's iOS has dropped to its lowest share of the smartphone market in urban China since July 2014, according to new data collected and shared by Kantar Worldpanel. Today's report specifically details smartphone shares around the world for the three months ending in February 2017. In total, devices running iOS dropped 8.9 percentage points from the same year-ago quarter, receding from 22.1...

A Beijing court has overturned a 2016 ruling that Apple's iPhone 6 violated a Chinese manufacturer's patent, which saw intellectual property regulators attempt to bar sale of the phone in the country (via South China Morning Post). Last June we reported that ailing company Shenzhen Baili filed a lawsuit against Apple claiming that the iPhone 6 violated the patent of its 100c smartphone....

Apple CEO Tim Cook sat down for an interview with Chinese media outlet Caixin on Tuesday, in which he emphasized Apple's ambitions in China and its long-term commitment to investment there. Despite Apple's need to see off competition in the country from the likes of Chinese mobile makers Oppo and Huawei, Cook took pains to explain that Apple isn't simply in China to grab a piece of the market, ...

With the news earlier today that Apple has ditched the PRODUCT(RED) branding for the red iPhone 7 and 7 Plus in China, MacRumors reached out to CEO Tim Cook to find out if any of the proceeds on sales in the country would still be donated to charity in the fight against HIV/AIDS. MacRumors' question: We noticed the (PRODUCT)RED branding is missing from the new red iPhone 7 on the China Apple...

Tim Cook visited Beijing-based bike-sharing company ofo on Tuesday, according to Reuters. The Apple CEO has been in China since at least Saturday, when he gave a wide-ranging talk at the China Development Forum. During his ofo stop, Cook met with founding members including CEO Dai Wei, and posed for pictures of him riding a yellow ofo bike. "Thanks for welcoming me today, ofo team! Great...

Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a talk on Saturday to attendees of the China Development Forum 2017, where he offered commentary on a range of issues including globalization, economics, and data privacy. The annual forum is a high-profile conference in which senior Chinese government officials, global corporation leaders, institutions, and scholars gather to discuss major issues including Chinese...

Apple announced today that it will set up two additional research and development centers in China, to go with the two locations in the country that it announced last year. The new R&D centers will open in Shanghai and Suzhou, the company said in a statement on its Chinese website on Friday. Apple hopes the centers will help it to attract graduates from institutes such as Peking University,...

Qualcomm, ZTE, and China Mobile have announced plans to start interoperability testing and outdoor trials for the new 5G radio specifications being developed by the 3GPP group (via DigiTimes). The interoperability testing and trials will launch in China starting in the second half of 2017, with the goal of the trials being to showcase how 5G NR technologies can efficiently achieve multi-gigabit...

Apple has fallen to fifth place in China's booming smartphone market, where combined sales reached 131.6 million units in the fourth quarter of 2016, accounting for nearly a third of worldwide shipments. The Q4 figure confirmed the highest ever annual amount of smartphones sold in China, according to market research firm Canalys, with shipments for the year reaching 476.5 million units, rising...

Apple remained the fourth largest smartphone vendor in China in 2016, beaten out by Oppo, Huawei, and Vivo in first, second, and third places, respectively, according to new data from research firm IDC. As a whole, IDC said it was a good year for the smartphone market in China, which saw a 19 percent year-over-year growth in 2016, and a 17 percent quarter-over-quarter growth in the fourth quarter ...

Xiaomi vice president Hugo Barra today announced that he will be leaving the Chinese smartphone maker next month. The former senior Android executive at Google said he will be returning to Silicon Valley in February after the Chinese New Year to reunite with friends and family. He described moving to Beijing, some "6,500 miles out of his comfort zone," as the "greatest and most challenging...

Apple manufacturing partner Foxconn is planning to build a new facility next to the iPhone maker's upcoming research and development center in Shenzhen, China, according to Nikkei Asian Review. The report cites an unnamed source who claims the facility will enable Foxconn to "better help Apple create prototypes of new products in this new campus," set to open in 2017. Apple's own facility in ...

Apple is planning to open a flagship retail store underneath Piazza del Liberty, or Liberty Square, in Milan, the most populous metropolitan area in Italy, according to preliminary guidelines approved by the city's planning department last month. Render of planned flagship Apple Store in Milan, Italy The retail store will be developed by architecture firm Foster and Partners, who have...