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The Ministry of Home Affairs has recommended a ban on 54 Chinese mobile applications, including the popular game Garena Free Fire, citing that these applications pose a threat to national security as per TOI.
The game has gained a lot of popularity in past few years. According to App Annie ‘State of Mobile’ 2021 report the top game in India in terms of consumer spending was Free Fire and also number of downloads after Ludo King.
Tencent’s Xriver, NetEase’s Onmyoji Arena are the other apps which are banned by the government. In total, the government has banned 300 apps so far.
These apps seem to be either the cloned version or of similar functionality, which is concerning the privacy issue and security threats similar to previously blocked apps by the government in 2020.
On 29 June 2020, the government had initially blocked 59 apps followed by 47 related/cloning apps on 10 August 2020 and 118 apps were blocked on 1 September 2020 with in two months 43 apps were blocked on 19 November 2020.
Garena FreeFire is one of the popular gaming apps in India with over 184,700 ratings on App Store and over 105,501,450 on Google Play. The game seems already missing from the Google Play Store.
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