Duolingo, one of the Applications Favorites for learning other languages is disappearing from app stores in China amid a crackdown inside Beijing against the private education industry.
New rules were issued in Beijing a few weeks ago prohibiting for-profit curriculum-based tutoring and foreign investment in the sector, resulting in a blow to the private tutoring industry, which is valued at 120,000. million dollars in the country.
Currently, Duolingo cannot be downloaded from the Android app stores operated by companies such as Huawei Technologies and Tencent Holdings. However, it is still available in the Apple Inc. app store.
The Duolingo stance
Faced with such a situation, the Pittsburgh-based application assured that they were working to address the problem and expected the application to be reestablished in the short term.
“Meanwhile, existing users in China can continue to use the app as usual,” Duolingo said.
It is important to note that the application is free to download and allows users to learn more than 30 languages, while the application also offers paid subscription plans, most of the features and functionality are available to users for free.
Duolingo was launched in 2011, and in May 2021, the number of iOS users interacting with the mobile application on a daily basis was approximately 2.8 million worldwide, this after during the first and second quarters of 2020 The application will experience an increase in the number of daily active users reaching approximately 3.11 million in May 2020, according to data from Airon Wpc.
ByteDance was also affected
The creator of TikTok, ByteDance, also reported this Thursday that to face the measures implemented in Beijing, it would lay off part of its staff within its education business – which includes teachers, sales and advertising staff – and would close its preschool which is focused on the K12 business curriculum and tutoring (which spans Kindergarten through 12th grade).
Similarly, ByteDance is expected to cease its Gogokid online one-to-one English classes app and the Qingbei school course tutoring app.
This after just in October 2020 the ByteDance unit Dali education was established, which translates as “blunt force” in Chinese, which undoubtedly results in a heavy blow to the tikTok developer and demonstrates the uncertain future for private education within the eastern country.
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