Skip to main content

With Trump’s WeChat ban approaching, here are several alternatives

Our mission to help you navigate the new normal is fueled by subscribers. To enjoy unlimited access to our journalism, subscribe today.

WeChat, China’s most popular app, faces an imminent ban in the U.S., leaving many of its users in a bind.

The White House said Friday it would prohibit WeChat, owned by Beijing-based Tencent, from appearing in U.S. app stores starting Sunday at midnight. 

Though WeChat has a comparatively minor U.S. presence, it remains a major conduit for communications between Chinese nationals living abroad and their friends and family back home. The app has an average of 19 million million daily active users in the U.S. versus more than a billion worldwide. 

WeChat, called Weixin in China, is effectively the operating system for people’s digital lives in China. They use it to pay for services, hail cabs, go shopping, read news, chat, and more.

For people seeking to bridge the digital divide between the U.S. and China, WeChat is not easily replaced. China’s restrictions on foreign tech outlaws obvious substitutes, such as Facebook’s WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google’s Gmail and Gchat, and chat app Telegram.

While some people based in the U.S. may rush to install WeChat before new downloads become restricted, this is only a stopgap measure. When updated versions of WeChat’s software are released worldwide, U.S.-based users will be unable to update their apps, leaving them vulnerable to hackers.

Here are three alternative apps: 

iMessage

China is a major market for Apple. A substantial part of the iPhone-maker’s supply chain is based there—and so the company has enjoyed some permission to operate where rival tech giants, like Google and Facebook have not. 

Apple products come with a native messaging service, iMessage, that remains available in China. The service, which is generally encrypted and private (especially if you turn off iCloud storage), should work over the Internet.

While China has hundreds of millions of iPhone users, not everyone owns one. Other smartphone makers, like Huawei, compete for a share of the country’s 1.4-billion-strong population. 

Signal

In case your friends and family aren’t in the Apple family, you may consider downloading another chat app called Signal, developed by a nonprofit called Open Whisper Systems.

Signal has been praised by cybersecurity researchers as having best-of-breed encryption. The technology helps keep conversations safe, secure, and private.

You might be using Signal’s tech already and not even even realize it. Facebook’s WhatsApp uses the same underlying software to protect its 2 billion users. 

For now, Signal is not banned in China, and its downloads have been surging in the wake of the impending WeChat ban.

Wickr

Another chat app that may work is Wickr, which can’t be downloaded in China, but it can be brought into the country after being downloaded elsewhere.

The encrypted messaging service uses a VPN-like method to remain operational in nations where it might otherwise be censored. CEO Joel Wallenstrom told tech blog the Verge in 2018 that “people trust very secure stuff to Wickr, and they’re trusting us not only to secure the data but that we’ll get it where it needs to be.”

VPN and video conferencing

There are other options for people living in China to stay in touch with their relations abroad. Some can require some technical know how, like installing a VPN, to circumvent Chinese censorship.

Other options include video conferencing apps, like Zoom, Skype, or Houseparty, the last of which is partly owned by Epic Games, a video game maker partly owned by Tencent. 

More must-read tech coverage from Fortune:



from Fortune https://ift.tt/33LhjM2
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Photo finish: Crashing sales force Olympus to sell iconic camera business

Sometimes, the vicissitudes of capitalism force companies to exit the businesses for which they’re best known. Olympus, once a leading light in the photography industry, is now joining that list. On Wednesday, the company said it planned to quit its 84-year-old camera business. The imaging giant, known for its once-pervasive digital cameras, agreed to sell off the declining unit by year’s end. Japan Industrial Partners, a private equity firm best known for buying Sony’s struggling Vaio computer line in 2014, agreed to purchase the business. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. A glance at Olympus’s financial statements provides all the rationale for the divestiture; as at rival manufacturers, camera sales have plummeted over the past decade. For the fiscal year ended March 31, Olympus’s camera unit declined 10% versus the year prior to  ¥43.6 billion, or $407 million. The unit’s sales have collapsed by three-quarters from a decade ago, when the company brought in ¥175 billion, or $
Post a Comment
Read more

WHO says common steroids can slash death risk for the sickest coronavirus patients

Our mission to help you navigate the new normal is fueled by subscribers. To enjoy unlimited access to our journalism,  subscribe today . An old drug can learn new tricks during the coronavirus pandemic. That’s the main takeaway from the World Health Organization (WHO) in a new analysis of corticosteroids—a class of drugs which have existed for dozens of years and are far cheaper than new, experimental COVID treatments in development—suggesting that drugs like dexamethasone can slash the chances of COVID-19 related deaths by as much as 35% in the sickest patients. The WHO analysis of coronavirus drugs encompassed seven separate studies. And while an analysis of this sort—what’s called a “meta-analysis”—isn’t as rigorous as other types of trials like a randomized controlled study, the data are compelling. Corticosteroids have a very different action mechanism from many of the other coronavirus drugs in development. COVID-19 is a peculiar disease. Some who have been infected may be
Post a Comment
Read more