HRW: Apple removed 1,213 apps on Russian requests, nearly 60% of its global total

Human Rights Watch published a report on 24 September on how Russia is closing off the tools people use to get around censorship. The individual events in it were reported as they happened. Put in one place, they describe something more specific than a crackdown: a state that has stopped trying to block VPN traffic and started removing the companies, the payments and the distribution instead.

One number in the report is worth pulling out before anything else. In 2025 Apple removed 1,213 applications in response to Russian requests. That was nearly 60 percent of all such removals it made anywhere in the world.

What the report actually documents

The blocking itself is old news and, by the state's own measure, not working: usage estimates have stayed high through years of filtering. What changed is the target. Instead of chasing traffic, the pressure now lands on everything a VPN needs in order to exist as a product.

The clearest case in the report is Amnezia VPN in June 2026. Its addresses were blocked in bulk, its employees received phishing emails, and the service was hit with DDoS attacks. Recovery took a month and a half. None of that is content moderation or traffic filtering. It is an attack on a company.

We covered two of the mechanisms separately as they appeared: the shift from blocking apps to blocking the hosting they run on, and the regulator's request that Russian apps detect a VPN and report what they find.

The app store is the single point of failure

A blocked address can be replaced. A blocked protocol can be disguised. What cannot be routed around is removal from the two stores through which almost every phone in the world installs software. There is no second channel on iOS, and on Android the alternatives are technical enough that most people will not use them.

This is where the story stops being Russian. When Apple removed the VPN apps in Russia in March, the notice it sent developers said the app "included content that is illegal in Russia". When Apple removed every major VPN from the Chinese App Store in July 2017, the notice said the apps "include content that is illegal in China". Same sentence, same mechanism, nine years and one country apart. The template is not specific to any government. It is available to all of them, and the same store has already been used to take down a Russian product globally when Apple pulled VK worldwide.

What Human Rights Watch is and is not asking for

It is worth being exact, because this report is being summarised as a demand that Apple and Google stop complying. The text is more cautious than that. It asks technology companies to resist government pressure, and asks other governments and organisations to support the tools people use to reach information. There is no itemised list of demands aimed at either company.

That caution is not timidity, it reflects the position the companies are actually in. Google was fined for distributing VPNs through Play. Apple was told that an app breaks Russian law. Refusing means fines, and eventually a question about whether the company operates in the country at all. Saying "resist pressure" is easy to write and expensive to do, and the report does not pretend otherwise.

What this changes for someone reading outside Russia

Directly, nothing today. Indirectly, it shows where the pressure actually lands. Every argument about encryption and circumvention eventually reaches a point where the state cannot break the technology, and at that point it stops trying and goes to whoever ships the software. The company in the middle is not a party to the dispute and has no particular interest in it, which is exactly what makes it the efficient place to apply pressure.

The practical reading for a user is narrower and duller: an app you rely on can disappear from your store without your device changing at all, and the copy already installed stops getting updates. That is worth knowing before it matters, and it is the reason people in heavily filtered countries keep installer files and second routes rather than trusting a store listing to stay where it is.