The Chinese Government Has Begun Cracking Down on Podcasting Apps

Apple walks a very difficult line in China, since the company is required to comply with the laws of that country if it plans to keep doing business there, even when many of those laws fly in the face of the civil liberties that the rest of us take for granted.

Many of Apple’s services aren’t available in China due to government restrictions, with Apple TV+ nowhere to be found inside Chinese borders, and the iTunes Movies and Apple Books stores shut down by the Chinese government only six months after their debut.

It’s also not uncommon for Apple to be forced by Chinese authorities to pull high-profile apps from the App Store in that country, as was the case with The New York Times app three years ago, and of course the more recent crackdown on HKmap Live for reasons that generally seemed hard for Chinese authorities to justify.

That said, however, Apple does clearly try to skirt these restrictions as much as possible, as we saw earlier this year with reports that Apple has been allowing unapproved games on the App Store for years, despite ongoing criticism by Chinese media.

The Latest Threat: Podcast Apps

Now it looks like there’s another category of apps that’s raising the ire of the Chinese Cyberspace Administration — Podcast apps.

Popular Podcast app Pocket Casts recently found itself the latest victim of the Chinese government’s capriciousness, reporting that it’s been pulled by Apple at the request of the Chinese government since it can apparently be used to access content that’s deemed illegal in China.

Pocket Casts told the The Verge that Apple didn’t provide any specific reasons for the removal, except to say the it violated Chinese law and therefore Apple had no choice but to remove it at the request of the Chinese government. When asked, Apple couldn’t provide specifics on which content violated Chinese law, suggesting that the developer reach out to the Cyberspace Administration of China directly in order to find out.

The move was a punch in the gut for Pocket Casts, which counts China among its largest and fastest-growing markets, but the developer has also firmly stated that it believes “podcasting is and should remain an open medium, free of government censorship” and therefore will not censor its podcast content to appease Chinese authorities, even if it means losing its audience in that country.

It doesn’t appear that Pocket Casts is being singled out here, either, with The Verge noting that Castro, another podcast app was also pulled from the App Store, although they originally speculated that it may have been due to their support of Chinese pro-democracy podcasts in Hong Kong.

Pocket Casts does note, however, that Chinese authorities initially reached out to them through Apple before ordering the app removed from the Chinese App Store, and although it’s unclear what the nature of that request was, it seems likely it was related to censoring the content available in the app.

Apple’s own Podcasts app remains available in China, however there have been reports that Apple has complied with the Chinese government’s request to censor the shows that are available in the Chinese region, and has in fact been doing so since last September — a move that was likely necessary to avoid the same fate that third-party Podcast apps seem to now be suffering.

It’s not clear at this point, however, which specific podcasts China considers illegal, or what Podcast app developers would need to do in order to stay on the App Store in that country. It also may not even be an issue of individual podcasts as much as a desire for the Chinese government to exercise the kind of blanket censorship that it’s more typically known for.