Apple removed 190 apps from its Russian App Store at the request of Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor between 2022 and 2024, the company’s own annual transparency reports for those three years show.
Though the number of apps removed from the Russian App Store has risen every year, that number rose hugely in 2024, when the Russian authorities began cracking down far more aggressively on online freedoms than it previously had done.
After removing just seven apps in 2022, and 12 in 2023, Apple deleted 171 apps in 2024, meaning that Russia ranked second only to China by the number of apps removed at the request of the authorities.
In the vast majority of cases — 182 out of 190 — Roskomnadzor invoked the same piece of Russian legislation setting out the grounds for blocking websites in its requests to the US tech giant. These range from the dissemination of materials by “undesirable organisations” to incitement to terrorism. A further seven apps were removed for breaching Russian financial laws, specifically to combat illegal securities trading, online fraudsters and the theft of personal data.
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As an addition, it is noteworthy that Apple is (in-)famous to bow to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party. For example, one report reads, Apple’s censorship in China is just the tip of the iceberg after the Chinese government ordered Apple to remove several widely used messaging apps—WhatsApp, Threads, Signal, and Telegram—from its app store.
According to reports from 2020, Apple purges nearly 30,000 apps from Chinese App Store.
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If an apps poses a threat to people or something, the state should have the right to prohibit that very much as other things in the ‘real’ world. But Russia, China, and other autocracies ban apps to increase surveillance and foster their own dictatorial policies. China, for example, banned gay dating apps as far as I remember, along with tens of thousands other apps. Now Russia is banning Signal and other messengers. The regimes are trying to protect themselves and limit their own people’s freedom.
The US does the same thing too, just in the past year.
The US government banned ICE gestapo surveillance apps and apps that would bring the community together and warn of incoming kidnappings, also a video aggregation app or something for documenting ICE crimes.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t like a government banning gay dating apps or encrypted messengers. I’m just saying that it’s the right of the state to ban certain apps. From an ethical point of view there can be good or bad intentions behind such a ban. You can do so to keep the free press out or to spy on your citizens, but you can also do so to protect your citizens.
E.g. Germany didn’t allow Tesla to test rollout the US version of their ‘self driving’ software to protect people from accidents. Likewise, that new Amazon service to bundle the live feed of all their customers’ surveillance cameras which they claim is to ‘find lost dogs’ (it was a superbowl commercial) isn’t in line with German data protection laws and therefore hopefully never allowed here.