I have a chinese friend and when I asked them to look for signal, whatsapp, or telegram, the apple app store had them all but they didn't work after they installed it. They just got a loading screen or couldn't sign up.

Android custom ROM scene was big back when I was rooting and playing with ROMs, as people found how to root their obscure phones by translating chinese forum posts. You don't have to access apk sites, there are other ways to share apks. Last I heard fdroid was accessible from China as far back as 2014 until recently.

Here's a quote from fdroid themselves.

In the Chinese app store market five to ten commonly used app stores, and yet even the largest has less than a majority market share. Most Chinese people have more than one app store on their phone, so there is no monolith there, whereas “outside of China, Apple and Google control more than 95 percent of the app store market share”.

https://f-droid.org/en/2022/11/23/why-curation-and-decentralization-is-better-than-millions-of-apps.html

Do some research before you perpetuate misinformation that confirms your bias.

But fuck the CCP for authoritarianism.