After Google banned the Ethereum (ETH) wallet and the DApp browser MetaMask from the Play Store, Apple may now do the same by coercing Coinbase to remove DApps from its crypto wallet application.
While the crypto community mostly sees the efforts by big tech as a measure to suppress the rise of crypto, the tech giant Google, however, says that MetaMask’s Android client DApp browser was in violation of its financial services policies -something MetaMask denied.
Based on a Reddit post published on December 28, Coinbase stated that it may have to potentially let go of the DApp browser to comply with Apple’s App Store policies. Moreover, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong commented on the post saying:
“Coinbase CEO here. This is really unfortunate to see. Apple seems to be eliminating usage of Dapps from the App Store. If Apple customers want to be able to use Dapps, we may need to make this request know to Apple in some way. This is an important area of innovation in finance, and many developers and early adopters of this technology have millions of dollars worth of crypto tied up in these financial applications, which they no longer will be able to use on Apple mobile devices if this app store policy continues.”
It is worth noting that Apple is considering banning the browser from its mobile ecosystem right after Google did the same. What’s more, it was further revealed that tech companies were doing so to prevent mobile mining – again something MetaMask denied it was doing.
As of now, MetaMask’s appeal to revoke the decision has been rejected and the firm tweeted saying, “The appeal rejection cited the same policy: No mining on @Android. We don’t.”
In the last couple of days, several prominent YouTube creators in the realm of crypto have seen their videos being abruptly removed from the platform, only to be reinstated later with YouTube claiming that the removals were an error.
However, the YouTube content started getting restored only after several prominent personalities spoke up; nonetheless, several creators are still reporting that their content hasn’t been restored yet.
Crypto influencers such as Omar Bham are under the opinion that big tech is making swift moves to protect itself from the competition of decentralized institutions.
“Web3 is in direct competition with Google & Apple. We should expect continued censorship on MetaMask, Coinbase, & other dapp browsers,” tweeted Bham.
Ccensorship of crypto content across YouTube, followed by the removal of DApp browser across Google’s Play Store and a potential removal across Apple’s App Store is raising quite a few eyebrows among the crypto community.
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