This article originally appeared on ABACUS The hottest app in India right now is an app that says it will detect and remove Chinese apps from your smartphone. Just 10 days after it launched, Remove China Apps soared to the top spot on India’s Google Play Store. The developer OneTouch AppLabs says it racked up 1 million downloads in that period, and it currently shows more than 5 million installs on Google Play. The Android app purportedly identifies all the apps on a smartphone that are made by Chinese companies and lets users uninstall them. If you’re found to not have any Chinese apps at all, you’ll be greeted with a message saying, “Congratulation[s]. You are awesome. No China app found in your system.” Whether you actually have no Chinese apps on your phone, though, is another question. In our own testing, the app seems to have some major gaps in what it considers a Chinese app. Other reports also suggest results can be inconsistent. While testing Remove China Apps on an Oppo Reno 2, the app successfully detected WeChat, Weibo, Taobao and UC Browser as Chinese apps. But mobile payments app Alipay, ByteDance’s short video platform TikTok, and the Tencent-made game PUBG Mobile were also installed on the phone -- and went unnoticed. Other publications got different results. Over at Android Authority , Adamya Sharma writes that the app did recognize TikTok as a Chinese app, but it also missed PUBG Mobile. And TechCrunch reports that some user tests show the app also flags the popular American video conferencing app Zoom, although it didn’t in our test. The San Jose-based company was founded by a Chinese American, but it faced controversy earlier this year after it was found to have routed some user data through China , where most of its engineering team is based. (Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba, the owner of Taobao and UC Browser. Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial owns Alipay.) The apparent fickle nature of the app puts its methodologies in question. The app description on Google Play says an app’s determined country of origin is based on “market research,” adding that it doesn’t guarantee that the information is correct. The company also says the app was made for “educational purposes only” and that it doesn’t promote or force users to delete apps. The app’s popularity comes as anti-China sentiment is gaining momentum in India as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and border tensions between the two countries. Following a call to boycott Chinese products by famous Indian engineer Sonam Wangchuk and Bollywood stars Arshad Warsi and Milind Usha Soman , Indian internet users also joined the pledge with hashtags on Twitter and Instagram that include #BoycottMadeinChina, #BoycottChineseProducts and #BoycottTikTok. OneTouch AppLabs appears to have been started just to put out Remove China Apps, as it’s the only app it has listed on Google Play. And the company’s website domain registration shows that it was created on May 8. Some Chinese tech companies have made significant headway in India in recent years. Apps like UC Browser and TikTok have become immensely popular, drawing hundreds of millions of users. And Chinese investors and tech giants have also been funding Indian startups, hoping to cultivate the emerging market’s next big thing. But while Remove China Apps wants to make removing Chinese software as easy as tapping a button, people in India who truly want to boycott China will find getting rid of Chinese hardware a more challenging task. According to reports from IDC and Counterpoint, four of the five biggest smartphone brands in India are Chinese. In the first quarter , Xiaomi and Vivo took the top two spots with 30% and 17% market share respectively. Oppo’s sub-brand Realme and Oppo ranked the fourth and fifth, according to Counterpoint. Samsung is the only non-Chinese brand among India’s top five, with its 16% market share putting it in third place.
