More than most · 122 of 175 storefronts
What is censored in Italy?
The App Store in Italy looks typical: about as many widely-used apps are missing here as in most others Apple operates. 17.4% of the apps with 10,000+ user ratings worldwide that we have tested here are unavailable but still available somewhere else — 621 of 3,563, against 18.8% for the typical storefront.
621 widely-used apps unavailable here3,563 widely-used apps tested here = 17.4%
The 1,099 apps unavailable in Italy are still sold in other App Stores — a free second Apple ID can install them. How it works — GreatFireVPN ↗
What this number counts, and what it cannot show
Of the apps we have tested here that have at least 10,000 user ratings worldwide and are still on sale somewhere, the share you cannot get here. Both sides of the fraction are what we tested in this storefront, so an app we have not tested here is in neither and cannot move the figure either way — which is the whole reason this is a share and not a count. Nothing about how widely an app is distributed enters it, so an app sold in one other storefront counts exactly as much as one sold in all 175.
621 of the 3,563 widely-used apps we have tested here are unavailable — 17.4%. · median 18.8%
This correlates 0.51 with how many apps we have tested here — better than a raw count of missing apps, slightly worse than the fixed-basket count it replaced, because which widely-used apps we happened to test here is not a random sample of them. Its other weakness is shared by every version of this measure: a region-locked app is missing from nearly every storefront, so about three-quarters of a typical share is a floor almost everyone stands on. That is why the middle of the ranking is much flatter than its ends, and why a rank in the middle should not be read as a finding.
Measured Oct 6, 2026
Which notable apps are missing, by kind
The 224 apps above, sorted by what kind of app each one is. We watched 29 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
224 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: 61 of the 224 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 224, we watched 29 disappear from this storefront, 2 of them in the last year. The rest have been absent for as long as we have been testing here.
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 Apr 25, 2019 — anything that went before then has no date in our record.
VPN and proxy5
Social and messaging171 in the last year
News19
Privacy and security1
Most used
Most recently gone
Religion4
Most recently gone
LGBTQ+2
Most recently gone
Dating9
Gambling and betting4
Most used
Most recently gone
Shopping25
Entertainment23
Most used
and 18 more
Most recently gone
Finance14
Most used
and 9 more
Most recently gone
Utilities13
Food and drink12
Most used
and 7 more
Most recently gone
Games12
Most recently gone
Lifestyle11
Most recently gone
Photo and video9
Most used
and 4 more
Most recently gone
Productivity9
Most used
and 4 more
Most recently gone
Music7
Books5
Travel5
Business4
Most recently gone
Medical31 in the last year
Most recently gone
Weather3
Most recently gone
Health and fitness2
Most recently gone
Navigation2
Most used
Most recently gone
Education1
Most used
Most recently gone
Graphics and design1
Most used
Most recently gone
Reference1
Most used
Most recently gone
Sports1
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 — 12.9% of the 8,497 apps we have tested in this storefront, at any size. How many we have tested differs eightfold between storefronts, so that total compares poorly across countries. It is the share beside it, whose denominator is what we tested here, 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.