Garena Free Fire, the battle royale game that was among the mobile apps and games the government banned on Monday, is still available for download in India through Samsung’s Galaxy Store. In addition to Free Fire, the AppLock developed by DoMobile is available on the Samsung store, without any restrictions. The ban imposed by the IT ministry resulted in the immediate removal of Free Fire, AppLock and 52 other apps from Google Play and Apple’s App Store in the country.
as initially identified by 91Mobiles, Garena Free Fire is available for download via the Galaxy Store that comes preloaded on Samsung devices.
Gadgets 360 was able to independently verify the existence of Free Fire on the Galaxy Store.
Once installed, the game is available to play without any restrictions. Users can also install their updates from the Galaxy Store.
Alongside Garena Free Fire, the Galaxy Store has AppLock as at least one more app in the list of apps and games that were banned on Monday.
Garena Free Fire (left) and AppLock (right) are both available for download from the Galaxy Store
Gadgets 360 has reached out to Samsung for comment and will update this article when the company responds.
Although the government banned the 54 additional apps and games for “security threats”, most users who have these apps and games installed on their devices can still use them.
This is different from the previous series of bans where game developers were ordered to completely shut down their servers. Telecommunications operators and Internet service providers (ISPs) were also instructed at the time to implement network access restrictions for users to access services that are part of prohibited apps and games.
People familiar with the development told Gadgets 360 that telcos and ISPs were not informed about the implementation of such restrictions this time around.
Garena in a brief statement on the matter said that it is working to resolve the situation and apologized to its users for any inconvenience.