About typical · 113 of 175 storefronts
What is censored in Belgium?
The App Store in Belgium looks typical: about as many widely-used apps are missing here as in most others Apple operates. 172 of the 1,216 apps with 10,000+ user ratings worldwide are unavailable here but still available somewhere else — the median storefront is missing 179.
What this number counts, and what it cannot show
Every app in a fixed basket of 3,329 — the apps we have tested in all 175 storefronts — that has at least 10,000 user ratings worldwide and is still available somewhere counts once if you cannot get it here. 1,216 of the basket qualify. Because every storefront is scored on exactly the same apps, this cannot be a report of how hard we have crawled here; and because nothing about how widely an app is distributed enters it, an app available in one other storefront counts exactly as much as one available in all 175.
172 of the 1,216 widely-used basket apps are missing here. · median 179
This correlates 0.44 with how many apps we have tested here, and its correlation with basket coverage is exactly zero, because every storefront is scored on the same apps. Its real weakness is elsewhere: a region-locked app is missing from nearly every storefront, so roughly four-fifths of any count is a floor almost everyone shares. That is why the middle of the ranking is much flatter than its ends, and why a rank in the middle of the table should not be read as a finding.
Measured Sep 18, 2026
Which notable apps are missing, by kind
The 172 apps above, sorted by what kind of app each one is. We watched 23 of them disappear from this storefront; the rest have been absent for as long as we have been testing here.
How these kinds are worked out
172 widely-used apps are missing here, sorted by what they are. Every one is classified from its name and Apple's own category, so nothing is left out and nothing depends on a list being kept up to date: 55 of the 172 fall into a kind we defined — VPNs, news, messaging, privacy tools and so on — and the rest are shown under Apple's own category. Within each kind the most-reviewed apps come first, because the point is which apps people actually use.
Each kind is shown twice over: the apps in it people actually use, and the same apps by when they went. Of the 172, we watched 23 disappear from this storefront, 3 of them in the last year. The rest have been absent for as long as we have been testing here, which is a different thing from having been removed and is shown as such.
Names are matched conservatively, and the misses are the deliberate kind: an app called "IP Location Changer" is a VPN and is caught by name, while a privacy browser is filed under privacy rather than VPN. Apple's category is used wherever it is the better answer — every news app it labels `News` is one, whereas a name rule for "news" also catches a football-scores app and a jobs board. Dates are when we last saw an app available here, and we have been testing this storefront since Jul 28, 2019 — anything that went before then is counted as missing but not as removed.
VPN and proxy3
Most recently gone
Social and messaging191 in the last year
News18
Privacy and security1
Most used
Most recently gone
Religion3
Most recently gone
LGBTQ+2
Most recently gone
Dating7
Most used
- BLK: Black Singles Dating App
- Match™ - #1 Dating App.
- Upward: Christian Dating App
- Ourtime - Meet 50+ Singles
- Stir - Single Parent Dating
and 2 more
Most recently gone
Gambling and betting2
Most recently gone
Entertainment191 in the last year
Most used
and 14 more
Most recently gone
Finance12
Most used
and 7 more
Most recently gone
Games10
Most recently gone
Lifestyle9
Most used
- 交管12123
- 美团-美好生活小帮手
- Lemon8 - Lifestyle Community
- Thumbtack: Home Service Pros
- Fam - make new friends live
and 4 more
Most recently gone
Photo and video9
Most used
and 4 more
Most recently gone
Shopping9
Utilities8
Most recently gone
Productivity7
Most recently gone
Books5
Food and drink5
Music5
Most recently gone
Business4
Most recently gone
Travel4
Most recently gone
Medical31 in the last year
Most recently gone
Health and fitness2
Most recently gone
Weather2
Most recently gone
Education1
Most used
Most recently gone
Graphics and design1
Most used
Most recently gone
Navigation1
Most used
Most recently gone
Reference1
Most used
Most recently gone
How we test
The total at the top of the page is every app we have tested here that we cannot get but that is still available somewhere — 12.76% of the 8,243 apps we have tested in this storefront. How many we have tested differs between storefronts, so that total compares poorly across countries. It is the fixed-basket count beside it that is comparable.
Availability is checked against Apple's own catalog servers for every storefront, the same way the App Store app asks. "Unavailable" means Apple's servers say the app cannot be offered in that country — it does not say who asked for the removal. Removals initiated by the developer and removals demanded by governments look the same from outside; the history and context on this page are how we tell them apart.