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Photo: Florence Lo / REUTERS
A federal court in California has issued an injunction banning the proposed ban on WeChat in Apple and Google's US app stores.
This is a setback for the US government.
She ordered on Friday that the Chinese app could no longer be offered for download.
WeChat should disappear from the download platforms in the USA as early as Monday and lose most of its functionality.
According to judge Laurel Beeler, several WeChat users had sued.
The plaintiffs had raised serious questions, said Beeler, and invoked the right to freedom of expression enshrined in the first amendment to the US Constitution.
Beeler found that an injunction was justified because WeChat would suffer too much damage through sanctions, while the service could still prevail in the main proceedings.
The ministry did not initially comment on the decision.
The temporary injunction now states that the usability of WeChat for current US users must not be restricted.
That would also have been a consequence of the order of the Ministry.
You could have continued to use the apps, but no longer received updates.
This could have made the applications unattractive or even unusable over time.
Government officials had argued in the trial that lifting the ban would undermine President Donald Trump's efforts to ensure national security.
Beeler found, however, that although there is considerable evidence of how China is endangering national security, there is little specific evidence about WeChat.
Several million users in the US use WeChat, mostly to keep in touch with relatives and friends in China.
The US government warns that Chinese authorities could gain access to American data through WeChat.
The operator rejects this.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has given concerns about Chinese espionage as a reason for the measures against the short video app TikTok.
Trump sees the TikTok activities as a risk to national security.
He fears the information of the approximately one hundred million monthly users in the US could be shared with the Chinese government.
He had called for the company to be sold to a US company or to be closed.
The download lock for TikTok was postponed for a week on Saturday;
Trump had agreed to an agreement between the Chinese TikTok owner ByteDance and Oracle.
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ulz / Reuters / dpa
