Governments Found a Quieter Way to Censor the Internet: Remove the App

There was a time when a government that wanted to suppress an app had to actually block it. DNS filtering, IP blacklisting, and forcing ISPs to throttle connections to specific services. All of it visible, measurable, and reportable. Civil society organizations could document the block, users could recognize it, and a VPN could often work around it. That model still exists. But it's increasingly beside the point.

Governments have found something far more efficient: send a demand to Apple or Google, and let the app store do the work. No blocking needed. The app simply stops appearing in local search results, gets removed from the store entirely, and vanishes from the phones of users who haven't downloaded it yet. The access problem was solved before most users even knew it existed.

Key Takeaways

• Governments worldwide routinely pressure Apple and Google to remove politically sensitive apps, achieving censorship without ever blocking a website.
• Apple's 2025 App Store Transparency Report recorded 2045 apps removed under government takedown demands in a single year, with Russia responsible for over half of them.
• The concentrated control both companies have over app distribution turns their stores into a single, convenient pressure point for any state that wants to restrict what its citizens can access.
• When an app disappears from a store, most users have no idea why, they have no way to appeal, and no obvious alternative. That’s exactly what makes this tactic so effective.

Apple Publishes the Numbers, and They're Damning

Apple's 2025 App Store Transparency Report shows 2045 apps removed under government takedown demands in a single calendar year. Russia accounted for 1213 of those removals. Vietnam was second with 335. China came in at 196.

Think about that for a second. Russia, a country actively building what our own reporting describes as a permanent VPN kill switch, used Apple's own distribution infrastructure to silently kill more than a thousand apps in one year. Not blocking. Not filtering. Outright removing.

Apple's policy says apps removed under government demand are only taken down in the country that issued the request, with the app remaining available everywhere else. In practice, that distinction matters less than it sounds. Users in restricted countries don't routinely maintain foreign App Store accounts. When an app is gone from the local store, it's gone for most people.

Google Resisted More, but Not Completely

Russia's communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, issued more than 200 VPN removal orders against Google between March and April 2025. According to The Moscow Times, Google removed only six VPN services out of a possible 212 targeted.

The Moscow Times also reported that as of June 2025, 113 VPN apps were inaccessible in the Russian App Store and 111 in the Chinese version, 32 in the Belarusian, and 14 in the Turkish version.

It doesn't stop at Russia, either. The same dynamic played out in 2021 when Apple and Google pulled Alexei Navalny's tactical voting app from their stores under Kremlin pressure, reportedly including threats to arrest local staff. China had all major VPN apps wiped from its App Store in 2017 after the government issued new rules requiring providers to get government approval. And in 2025, both companies removed ICE-tracking apps from US stores following pressure from the Trump administration.

One Demand Is All It Takes

The ACLU said it plainly. Apple's iOS is designed to run only apps from the App Store. If Apple hasn't signed off on it, the app won't run. That's not a bug in their business model. That is the business model. And it's exactly what makes app stores such an attractive target for any government that wants to suppress something without generating the kind of visible backlash that a public block would create.

When Russia censors a website, people notice. Journalists write about it. The block shows up in OONI data and Freedom House reports. It's documentable. When Russia pressures Apple to remove a VPN app, and Apple quietly complies, most affected users just see an app that isn't there anymore. They don't know what they're missing.

This is what makes app store removal so insidious compared to traditional censorship. It doesn't just restrict access. It restricts the knowledge that there was something worth accessing in the first place. Ignorance may be bliss, but not in this case.

Sideloading Would Help, but Don't Hold Your Breath

The structural fix is obvious enough. If users could install apps from sources outside the official store, a practice called sideloading, a government removal order would lose most of its force. The app could still be distributed. Developers could still reach users.

Android has historically allowed sideloading, though newer policies have been pushing toward tighter control. Apple has resisted it entirely on iOS. The EU's Digital Markets Act forced Apple to allow alternative app stores in Europe, but the company's implementation has been described by critics as deliberately cumbersome.

Will this change at the scale and speed that censorship-affected users actually need? I wouldn't count on it. Sideloading isn’t in either company's commercial interest. And when it comes to a choice between commercial interest and a civil liberties argument from users in another country, the outcome tends to be predictable.

This Is Exactly What Authoritarian Governments Wanted

We covered how Russia is using state-mandated apps and VPN detection to track who's bypassing its internet restrictions. The removal of VPN apps from local stores is one component of that same infrastructure. Block the tools for circumvention. Install the tools for surveillance. 

In that context, Apple and Google's compliance isn't just a corporate failure. It's active participation in a control architecture, even if it happens through ordinary business policy and not deliberate intent.

Governments know now that they don't need to win a technical fight against encryption. They don't need to break VPN protocols or surveil every user. They just need to make VPN apps invisible to most users before those users ever think to look. App stores handed them exactly that capability, at no technical cost, with no public drama, and with built-in plausible deniability. It's clean. It's quiet. And it works.

The Internet Wasn't Built to Have Gatekeepers Like This

The internet was designed as a distributed system. Information was supposed to flow around blockages, not get stopped at a single-owned checkpoint. What app stores have created is the opposite of that: two companies with effective monopoly control over the software running on the world's smartphones, each serving as a convenient single point of failure for anyone who wants to restrict what those phones can do.

The users who get hurt are ordinary people in ordinary countries who just want secure, private internet access. They're not dissidents. They're not activists. They're people who'd rather not have their browsing monitored, and they used to be able to get a VPN app to help with that. 

A virtual private network is your answer to what app stores can't or won't protect, and you can get Mysterium VPN with 78% off right now.