iPad app Flipboard blocked in China

Has anyone ever seen these replica apps? It's appalling, really. They actually are identical, visually. Take flipboard, and replace the name with something generic with the 100% same font, design and style.

Every time I'm just as angry, but not once am I ever surprised.

The answer to that really quite simple question is BOTH. The Chinese clones are doing insanely well! The lucrative Chinese market is being milked by China's own companies. No doubt it's not just to allow better information control by the government, but to bolster local economies as well through completely unfair business tactics.

But hey, it's China. I'm already used to it.

Chinese censorship (like all censorship) is pretty evil, but it has to be said that outside of the USA, Flipboard kind of sucks anyway.

If you are not really into the mainstream USA news, and especially if you aren't interested in sports and business, there isn't much on offer. If you bother to dig into the settings and tell the app you aren't interested in these things, it gets really confused and starts offering you multiple copies of the Mumbai news and other useless stuff. This is mainly because you cannot tell the app what you want to see, you can only tell it that you *didn't* want to see this that or the other thing and only then if you really get involved with the program. Most people don't even discover that feature.

I don't think the makers of Flipboard know enough about the actual desires of the users outside of the USA to tweak the algorithm properly or discover the sources that they need, to actually provide relevant news to people in other countries. Because the users in other countries are for the most part okay with consuming USA news, I don't think the designers have discovered this yet.

The ceo of this company is obviously clueless when he makes a stupid statement like "Do the Chinese censor US services to protect their regime or to protect their market?" Is he even smart enough to be running this company. If he knew even just a little bit about Chine he would know that there is only one answer to this question - it is to protect the regime. These sites have been blocked in China for a long time and he somehow thinks that his silly little app should be allowed to deliver this blocked content?