A social networking app that went viral in Southeast Asia has seen downloads plummet after its links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were revealed.
Bondee, a social networking app with a variety of trendy avatars, was officially launched on Jan. 17. Bondee users can connect with others through personalized images and express their moods and situation.
Bondee lets users customize 3D avatars with various hairstyles, clothes, shoes, and accessories. They can also build their own virtual spaces, invite friends to visit their virtual homes, and indulge in camping, dancing, sailing, and other virtual activities.
Bondee soon became immensely popular among young people. In the last week of January, Bondee topped the weekly downloads charts in Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Taiwan, according to data.ai. In less than a month, the app was downloaded more than 5 million times on Google Play.
According to its website, the app was developed by Metadream, an independent technology company based in Singapore. Its product development and operations teams are based in Japan and South Korea, with three separate data centers in Singapore, Japan, and the United States. The company also plans to set up regional operations centers in Thailand and the Philippines.
Secret CCP Connections Disclosed
Bondee’s relationship with Chinese developers and the CCP has been investigated.
Some netizens noticed a resemblance between Bondee and a now-defunct Chinese app called Zheli, more frequently known as Jelly. Jelly was a metaverse app developed by a Chinese company.
To users of both apps, it became apparent that Bondee is highly similar to Jelly in terms of interface, characters, roles, and style.
Launched in China on Jan 19, 2022, in less than a month, Jelly overtook WeChat to become the number 1 social app on Apple Store.
However, on Feb. 13, the firm behind Jelly announced that it was pulling the app from the App Store, citing technical issues like crashing, lagging, and outages caused by the surge in demand. Chinese news aggregator Yidian Zixun, which operated Jelly, announced that in order to make its user experience smoother, the company had chosen to remove the app from the app store pending a system upgrade.
The app went from overnight boom to sudden disappearance in less than a month.
Social media apps on a smartphone in this file photo. (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
However, it was speculated that there were other reasons for the app’s disappearance. After registering to use the app, some netizens noticed an uptick in spam calls and messages and alleged that Jelly violated users’ privacy. On Feb. 11, Yidian Zixun responded that the allegation was untrue and called it slander by its competitors.
Notably, Yang Yuxiang, the legal representative and chief executive of Yidian Zixun, once worked for Citic Group and Ping An Securities Group, both backed by the CCP.
Jelly Repackaged
The sudden boom of Bondee has raised suspicions that the app is essentially Jelly, renamed to disguise its origin. In response, Metadream, which is based in Singapore, explained that Metadream had acquired the full intellectual property rights to Jelly from its developer, True.ly of China. Metadream claims to have developed the creative concept further and to have “internationalized” the app.
It seems that there is more to the story. According to an April 26 Bloomberg report, while Metadream is indeed incorporated in Singapore, the majority of the company’s staff are based in China.
As of February, Metadream shared legal and financial staff with the Chinese owners of Jelly, according to the Bloomberg report. What’s more, Metadream is led by Chinese financier Yang Yuxiang. Yang was listed as a director in Metadream’s Singapore regulatory filings but was recently removed.
The Epoch Times reached out to Metadream for comment but did not receive a response by press time.
Expert: Chinese Companies Should Distance Themselves From the CCP
As Metadream’s ties to the CCP continue to come to light, the number of downloads of Bondee has plummeted. According to data.ai, downloads of Bondee on the Apple store and the Google store dropped from 2.6 million in February to 400,000 in March. Many users not only abandoned Bondee but also took to social media to share how they deleted their accounts and uninstalled the app.
In addition, some users in Taiwan noticed that Bondee’s terms of use adopted the CCP’s terminology, referring to Taiwan as the “Taiwan region of China,” and that users in Taiwan must accept an additional clause. The clause is closely related to personal information and has deterred many Taiwanese users, while users in other countries do not need to accept it.
Metadream’s concealment of its ties to China was probably deliberate, Li Jixin, a Japan-based electronics engineer, told The Epoch Times on May 3. Although it is not clear what the company’s intentions were, Li said the concealment looked suspicious.
The logo of Chinese social media app TikTok is shown in a picture taken in Paris on Dec. 14, 2018. (Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images)
In Li’s opinion, in recent years, the trend of decoupling the CCP from Western societies has become more and more obvious, and Western societies have become more aware of China’s unscrupulous and unethical tactics.
For their part, warned by the criticism of TikTok, Chinese start-ups often adopt a localized approach or emphasize their global nature when they go abroad, in order to avoid being ostracized by Western societies.
“The problem with this is that by hiding the relationship with the CCP and not being honest, [Bondee] has already lost the trust of some users,” Li said.
“And since the CCP is behind all the companies in China, there is no way to dispel the fear that the CCP will force companies to share sensitive data [with it]. There is no way to dispel the fear of Western society about the security of personal information. This is also an embarrassment for all Chinese companies.”
Ellen Wan contributed to this report.