Methodology & FAQ

Apple Censorship is a platform created to track and analyze app censorship in Apple’s App Store. It monitors app availability across Apple’s App Stores worldwide and provides insights into which apps have been restricted or removed, shedding light on Apple’s content moderation practices globally. For more information, see the About section or contact us.

Yes. Apple Censorship lets you suggest apps for monitoring. Search for an app by name or keyword and our system will test its availability across Apple’s App Stores. Your contributions help us expand our monitoring and improve the accuracy of our data.

If you spot any errors or discrepancies in our data, please contact us through the feedback form available on the site. We value your input and will investigate and correct any issues as quickly as possible.

Contact us and we’ll do our best to reply promptly.

Not as a file from a button — the previous version of this page promised one, and this rebuild has no such button. What there is instead is a documented JSON API, which does more than a spreadsheet would:

• /api/apps/{appStoreId}/status — every storefront's latest reading for one app, with dates. It answers cross-origin, so it works from a script or straight from a browser console.
• /api/explore — the engine behind Explore: filter every app we hold by storefront, category, price, audience and availability, and read the counts back.
• /rss — removals as they are published.

Field definitions, and how often each figure moves, are in llms.txt. What we do not publish is a bulk dump of the underlying readings — there are tens of millions of them — so if your research needs that, ask us.

Because Apple sends that link to your storefront, not to the one you were reading about. It opens Apple's own page for the app, and Apple picks which of its 175 stores to show you from the billing address on your account. If the app is missing there you get Apple's error page — which is the answer arriving from the other direction: you have just confirmed our reading against Apple itself.

To check a storefront that is not yours, press Test on that storefront's row. The reading it produces is itself a link to the exact request we made — itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=…&country=… — so you can open Apple's raw answer for that country and read it yourself rather than taking ours on trust.

Search for the app by name, on the home page or from the search button in the header of any page. Suggestions come from Apple's own index rather than only from what we already hold, so you can ask about an app we have never seen.

On the app's page every storefront has a Test button, and where we hold no reading at all there is one button that takes the first four: China, the United States, India and Russia. A test runs in your browser, straight to Apple, which matters twice over — Apple rate-limits by address, so you spend your own quota rather than ours, and the answer describes what Apple serves your connection rather than a data centre. If your connection cannot reach Apple, which is the interesting case, we ask on your behalf through the crawler's residential proxy.

Every reading is kept and appears in that app's table with the second it was taken. The crawler also tests continuously on its own; the ticker along the top of the site is that, live. An absence lasting 24 hours or less is not counted as a removal on the deletions page, because an app that reappears within hours is usually our reading at fault rather than Apple's doing — it still appears in the app's own table.

Each storefront on an app's page reads Available, Unavailable or Not tested, with a date beside it where we watched the status change. Those are readings rather than verdicts: unavailable means Apple would not sell it there at the last check, while the app was still available somewhere else.

The distinction that matters is between an app we watched leave and one we have never seen there at all. Monitoring began in February 2019, so anything removed before then looks exactly like something never published — and roughly four in five apps we record as unavailable were never witnessed available in that storefront. Where we did watch it go, the app's page gives the date, and the storefront pages count those departures separately from the rest.

Deletions is the record of those departures as they happen. An app pulled from several storefronts on one day is listed once rather than a dozen times, and a change lasting under a day is left out, for the same reason as above.

The unavailability itself is measured — you can see it on any app's page, storefront by storefront, with the dates. What takes research is the cause, and these are the ways to narrow it down:

• By looking at the app's page (on AppleCensorship.com and not on the App Store) you can quickly find out in which App Stores the app is available or unavailable. An app that is available in one country was most probably uploaded for that country only. Some apps may be available in App Stores which share a common language (for example, Spanish-speaking countries).
• By comparing the app with others of its kind in the same storefront. If most of a category is missing from one country — 78% of the VPN apps we test are unavailable in mainland China, against 28% of everything we test there — then a private decision by one developer explains that shape badly. The app's own page now does this comparison for you and shows both figures.
• By checking whether the app left that storefront on the same day as others. A single developer's decision is a single decision; a dozen unrelated developers withdrawing from one country on one day is not a coincidence. Across our whole record an app leaves a storefront with fewer than two others on the same day, so a group departure stands out, and the app's page counts it.
• By searching for "external" information online. Information including media reports, press releases, or social media posts, might help to confirm the unavailability of an app.
• Ultimately, only by contacting the developer can one usually establish the cause. This is something that you might not do, but we will regularly contact developers of apps we suspect are being censored by Apple. Such contact can be helpful because Apple often removes apps from the App Store without informing developers. It is also the weakest link in the chain: the developer may be under pressure not to say, or may know no more than we do.

Where that research produces a citable answer, we record it and show it on the app's page. Where it does not — which is most of the time, for the reasons set out under the next question — the page weighs the possible causes against the evidence above and prints the reasoning, rather than either guessing at a cause or saying nothing at all.

Yes. That is the claim this project makes, and it is worth being exact about what the claim is, because it is a claim about Apple's system rather than a guess about any one app.

Apple runs 175 separate App Stores and assigns you to exactly one of them, by billing address. On an iPhone there is no other way to install an app. So an app missing from your storefront is not merely absent from one shop among many — it is unreachable, on the only route Apple permits onto a device you own. A distribution system with a per-country switch on every app is a censorship system, whatever the reason anyone had for throwing the switch. That is what we mean by Apple censorship, and it is why this answer no longer begins with "No". Our full reasoning is set out under why this matters.

What we usually cannot tell you with certainty is the cause. For any single app in any single storefront there are five possibilities:

• A government or a court demanded the removal and Apple complied.
• A local rule about paying for it — a gambling licence, a financial rule, tax. Apple can obey every one of these by refusing the payment rather than the download, which is why it is the only restriction we would accept, and why it cannot reach a free app at all. About 95% of the apps we hold are free.
• Apple applied a rule unasked: its own review guidelines, or its own reading of local law, which includes distribution permits as well as content. In 2021 it kept a free Bible app out of mainland China for want of one.
• The developer withheld it — freely, or under legal advice of their own, or because Apple's guidelines require that kind of app to be limited to certain countries.
• Something broke: a rejected update, a lapsed certificate, a licensing or payment problem, a mistake nobody has noticed.

From the readings alone these are indistinguishable. Apple's App Store Connect lets a developer deselect a country at any moment, with no new build and no public trace, and what our crawler then sees is exactly what a government-ordered removal looks like. So no page here claims to know which one happened. What each app's page does is weigh the five against whatever evidence exists for that app in that storefront — whether apps of the same kind go missing there far more often than everything else, whether it left on the same day as a group of others, whether anyone pays for it, how long it has been gone — and print that reasoning under each one, so you can disagree with our reading and keep the counts. Where a cause is documented we say so and cite the source. What we do not have is any measurement of how the five divide up across the App Store as a whole, and we do not publish a guess at one.

The reason we cannot do better is that Apple does not say. Its App Store Transparency Report gives the number of apps removed on government demand — 2,045 of the 166,899 apps it removed during 2025 — and the supplemental data file published alongside it names the government body and the specific statute behind every one of those 2,045. It names no app. Both halves of the answer are in the same release; joining them is the one thing Apple declines to do. Apple also used to report how many removal requests it received and how many it refused, which is the only way to tell compliance from initiative; that series ended in 2021 while every other part of the report carried on. Developers who are given a reason are given it privately, and whether it ever becomes public is left to them.

So the honest reading of this site is that the unavailability is measured and the cause is usually not on the record. The first half is our work. The second half is Apple's to fix.

On the mechanics: the App Store Monitor indexes apps across every storefront and marks an app unavailable in a storefront when we can still get it in at least one other. Unavailability lasting 24 hours or less is not counted as a removal on the detected-changes page, so brief technical faults do not become false positives, though every reading still appears in the test table on the app's own page.

The App Store Monitor (ASM), is a web crawler that indexes all apps available in any of the countries and regions which currently have an App Store, and verifies availability of these apps in each of these App Stores.

If an app is available in at least one App Store but remains unavailable in one or more App Stores, the ASM will mark that app as unavailable in those App Stores. It’s that simple!