Banned Chinese apps SHAREit and AppLock manage to get downloads in India

While the Indian government has banned several Chinese-origin apps permanently, SHAREit and AppLock have managed to bypass the scrutiny and garnered downloads in the country.

SHAREit and AppLock, the two Chinese apps which had been banned by the Indian government, were still available in India for downloads. SHAREit was allowing users to download through APK until Tuesday morning while AppLock appears to have relaunched its app.

SHAREit, owned by Smart Media4U Technology Pte. Ltd, was banned by the Indian government on June 29 whereas DoMobile-owned AppLock was blocked on September 2. On Monday, the government had issued a notice to ban 59 Chinese apps permanently. 

Entackr installed the SHAREit app via the APK available for download till Tuesday morning and found it working properly. According to SHAREit’s website, the company has more than 600 employees with offices in Singapore, Indonesia, and Dubai. It further claims to have over 1.8 billion users worldwide and more than 600 million users in India and Indonesia. 

However, SHAREit’s official website is currently down.

Hong Kong-based AppLock, which provides security layers to messages, contact details, call lists and other apps, has garnered over 1 million downloads since its relaunch in November 2020. AppLock claims to have 300 million users in over 150 countries and it supports 32 languages. DoMobile’s other products include Anole Launcher, MixNote and VIP password manager.

This is not the first time when Chinese-origin apps have tried to circumvent a ban by the Indian government. Soon after the ban on TikTok in the country, several short video sharing apps, including some clones, had entered the Indian market.

After reports of such apps operating in the country surreptitiously, the government blocked several lite version of some of the famous Chinese-origin apps and banned 43 more apps including Snack Video, AliExpress and DingTalk in November.