Following pressure from the Chinese government, tech giant Apple has removed two gay dating apps from the App Store.
Wired reports that the apps Blued and Finka were no longer available to download in China, with users additionally claiming that the apps were disappearing from the iOS and Android app stores. Despite this, both apps still work for those who have already downloaded them.
According to The Pink News, Blued has been named by The China Project as being “not only the largest dating app for gay men in China but also in the world,” with Finka cited as being the second-most popular. This follows the 2022 removal of LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr from the Chinese app store as well.
“We follow the laws in the countries where we operate. Based on an order from the Cyberspace Administration of China, we have removed these two apps from the China storefront only,” an Apple spokesperson told Wired, “Earlier this year, the developer of Finka elected to remove the app from storefronts outside China, and Blued was available only in China.”
Despite homosexuality having been decriminalized in China since 1997, same-gender marriage is still not recognized, and there are no legal protections against queer discrimination. It wasn’t even until 2001 that homosexuality was declassified as a mental disorder there.
Since 2016, mainstream Chinese media has had a habit of erasing LGBTQ+ representation from media. Working under official censorship guidelines, agencies deemed same-gender relationships as “abnormal” and thus they wave been included in the list of surveilled and prohibited content. Completely cutting out queer characters and storylines from certain TV shows and films.
They even went as far as to allegedly removing LGBTQ+ accounts from the Chinese social media and messaging app WeChat, with LGBTQ+ advocacy groups reporting that their accounts and all of their posts were erased.
