WeChat

The Trump administration is debating the scope and effective date of its bans on Chinese social media apps WeChat and TikTok and the decisions will be made public in the Federal Register around September 20, Bloomberg reported Wednesday citing people familiar with the matter.

The Trump administration is privately seeking to reassure US companies including Apple that they can still do business with the WeChat messaging app in China, Bloomberg reported on Friday citing several people familiar with the matter.

The WeChat team today announced that the mini-store, which began internal testing on July 24, is fully open to companies, individually owned businesses, and individuals.

Following US President Trump's threat to ban Tencent's social media app WeChat, there has been a surge in downloads of the app in the United States.

According to a Weibo survey, 95 percent of 1.2 million people said they would switch to an Android phone rather than give up WeChat if it were banned.

Tencent said that US President Trump's executive order banning its WeChat instant messaging service could have a minimal impact on its business if it only applies outside of China.

WeChat's global monthly active accounts reached 1.206 billion, up 6.5 percent year on year and 0.3 percent from the previous quarter, according to Tencent's second-quarter financial results released today.

On August 7, the US, citing the possibility of WeChat capturing personal and proprietary information of users in the US, asked that anyone be banned from conducting any WeChat-related transactions with Tencent and its companies for 45 days from the date of the order.

The US government's blocking of WeChat, which has the biggest impact on iPhones among Apple hardware products, may force Apple to remove WeChat from the App Store, Tianfeng International analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in a report released late Sunday.