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Chamarti Sreekar
Passionate about Pos... • 11d
How Iran and China did it without google or app store? when a country doesn't have Google. No YouTube, no Gmail, no Google Maps, no App Store. Most countries rely on Silicon Valley, but some had to build without it. In China, Google is blocked, so is WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. But instead of falling behind, they built their own internet. Baidu replaced Google and gets over 5 billion searches a day. WeChat became everything, from messaging to social and even taxes and has 1.3 billion users. Alibaba moves more goods than Amazon, eBay and Walmart combined, and TikTok is a Chinese export with over 1.5 billion users globally. In Iran, it's even harder. Sanctions banned most US tech, no Google Cloud, no App Store. So developers built their own ride-hailing apps, fintech tools, even cloud services. One local App Store, Jijl, has over 40 million users. That's half the country. This isn't just about censorship, it's about constraint-driven innovation. When you can't plug into Big Tech, you build your own stack from scratch. And while the rest of the world rents its tools from Silicon Valley, these countries are building their own empires, quietly and at scale. The question isn't why don't they use Google? It's what happens when they don't need it anymore.
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