Apple Services Censored in China Where Devices Flourished

When it comes to many of Apple's latest services, iPhone users in China are missing out. From a report: Podcast choices are paltry. Apple TV+ is off the air. News subscriptions are blocked, and Arcade gaming is nowhere to be found. For years, Apple made huge inroads in the world's most populous nation with hardware that boasted crisp displays, sleek lines and speedy processors. It peddled little of the content that boxed U.S. internet giants Google and Facebook out of the country. But now that Apple is becoming a major digital services provider, it's struggling to avoid the fate of its rivals.

Apple services such as the App Store, digital books, news, video, podcasts and music, put the company in the more precarious position of information provider (or at least overseer), exposing it to a growing online crackdown by China's authoritarian government. While standard iPhone services like iMessage work in China, many paid offerings that help Apple generate recurring revenue from its devices aren't available in the country. That includes four new services that Apple announced this year: TV+ video streaming, the Apple Card, Apple Arcade and the News+ subscription. Other well-known Apple services can't be accessed in the country either, including the iTunes Store, iTunes Movie rentals, Apple Books and the Apple TV and Apple News apps. Over the past year, Apple's Weather app lost its ability to show air quality index, or AQI, data for Chinese cities -- regardless of the user's location, the report adds. (Though this was due to a business dispute with Weather Channel.)