According to Apple’s 2025 App Store Transparency Report, Russia is the undisputed global leader in one category: requiring Apple to remove apps from its App Store.
In 2025, Russia asked Apple to remove 1,213 apps; Many of these VPN apps were designed to thwart the country’s draconian internet censorship. (Vietnam came in second, requesting 335 apps to be blocked.)
Basically, Russia is trying to build a closed, spy-friendly national version of the Internet. While the Russian government loves to demand that Apple ban apps, it only wants bad and degenerate apps banned. He doesn’t want good, powerful Russian apps to be banned, like VKontakte (a Russian version of Facebook) or the Max messaging app (state-mandated communications software, so creepy that one exile publication described it with the incredibly long headline: “You already know that Russian messenger Max spies on users. You probably don’t know how many surveillance tools it hides, including even a neural network for spying”).
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