Microsoft bans Chinese employees from using Android devices at work, orders them to switch to iPhones

What happened? Microsoft has informed all of its employees in China that they will soon be able to use iPhones only for work purposes. The ban on Android devices is part of Microsoft’s security initiative to provide a unified way to manage and verify employee identities.

The mandate, set to go into effect in September 2024, was announced in an internal memo seen by Bloomberg News. It will require Microsoft employees in China to verify their identities when logging into their work computers or phones. The change is part of Microsoft’s global Secure Future Initiative, which is intended to ensure that all employees use the Microsoft Authenticator password manager and Identity Pass app, among other things.

While Apple’s iOS store is available in China, Google Play is not. Local smartphone giants like Huawei and Xiaomi operate their own platforms in the country, but Microsoft has decided to block access from those companies’ devices to its corporate resources because they do not have Google’s mobile services, the note said.

Any employee in the country using an Android phone, including Huawei or Xiaomi, will receive an iPhone 15 as a one-time purchase. The Redmond giant is setting up drop-off points across China where employees can pick up their iPhones.

Microsoft is also enforcing a policy that only iPhones can be used in Hong Kong, even though the Google Play store is available in the special administrative region of China.

Microsoft has been beefing up its cybersecurity recently after several embarrassing breaches. The company detected a nation-state attack on its corporate email network last year, identifying the likely culprit as the Russian group Midnight Blizzard. The hackers had access to Microsoft’s corporate network for a month, compromising some of the company’s source code repositories and unspecified “internal systems.”

In April, a government review of an attack on Microsoft’s hosted email service Exchange Online by a group linked to China criticized the company for enabling a “cascade of security failures” that could have been prevented and should never have happened. The report described Microsoft’s security culture as “insufficient” and in need of a major overhaul.

Apple and Microsoft have not commented on the reports, but it’s easy to imagine Apple welcoming the news, especially considering that China began banning the use of iPhones in some government offices last year and that sales of the devices in the Asian country have recently declined.

Header: Gen Kanai