What is censored in South Africa?

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.

152 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

152 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: 47 of the 152 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 152, we watched 15 disappear from this storefront, 1 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 May 8, 2019 — anything that went before then is counted as missing but not as removed.