Facebook sneaks into China with a new app

Mark Zuckerberg. Photo credit: Facebook.

In a surprise move, Facebook has made and released an app just for China – where Mark Zuckerberg’s social network has been blocked since 2009.

Facebook’s China app, launched stealthily into the local app store under a company pseudonym, is a photo-sharing service called Colorful Balloons. The New York Times first spotted and reported on the app after verifying that it was indeed made by Facebook.

The Colorful Balloons app is actually a walled-off, China-only version of Facebook Moments, the spin-off app dedicated to photos that was first introduced mid-2015.

The two apps have almost identical app icons and interfaces. Colorful Balloons shows up in English for me because my iPhone is set to that language:

Photo credit: Tech in Asia.

“We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country in different ways,” Facebook said in a statement to the New York Times.

The furtive Facebook app actually hit China in May, but its origins were only discovered yesterday.

The launch of Colorful Balloons comes after years of careful diplomacy by Zuckerberg, who often visited mainland China, and even met with top officials in 2015 such as Lu Wei, the internet czar responsible for blocking Facebook and virtually every other overseas social media app.

Image credit: Tech in Asia.

In March 2016, Zuckerberg was widely mocked for taking a jog through heavily polluted downtown Beijing – on a day the air quality was ranked “very unhealthy.” “It’s great to be back in Beijing!” wrote the CEO in a Facebook post, making no mention of the pollution.

Facebook’s new China app is up against WeChat, the popular messaging app, as well as the Twitter-esque Weibo.