Social Livestreaming Platform Bigo Live Removed From App Store

The social livestreaming platform, Bigo Live, has been removed from the App Store globally as of April 9. There has been no response from Bigo regarding the matter. The application remains available for download on Google Play.

This is not the first time that Bigo Live has been removed from app stores. In 2016, Indonesia punished Bigo Live for allegedly containing pornographic content and shut down its domain name servers. Pakistan’s telecommunications regulatory authority also banned it due to “immoral” content on its platform. In June 2020, it was included in India’s list of banned mobile applications and was subsequently removed from app stores.

A Chinese media outlet reported that this recent removal may be due to non-compliance with advertising regulations.

Bigo Technology Pte Ltd (Bigo) started in Southeast Asia and was founded by Chinese internet company JOYY Inc., as well as JOYY’s chairman and CEO David Li in 2014 with headquarters located in Singapore.

Under Bigo are overseas live streaming platform Bigo Live, short video production sharing platform LIKE, and  video chat app imo. As of end-2019, these three products had nearly 400 million monthly active users (MAUs) across more than 150 countries worldwide while TikTok had over 500 million MAUs during the same period.

In November 2022, JOYY released its Q3 financial report which showed that Bigo achieved a cumulative net profit of $230.4 million under non-US GAAP accounting standards for Q1-Q3 2022 compared to $78.5 million during the same period last year, an increase of approximately 193%. The average monthly active users on mobile devices using Bigo Live increased by 14.2% year over year to reach 35.4 million compared to 31 million during Q1-Q3 in 2021.

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