India has used a content-blocking law to push a messaging app off iPhones in the country, and Apple carried out the removal.
The app, Bitchat, was built by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to run over Bluetooth rather than the internet, letting nearby phones relay messages between each other. It needs no accounts or phone numbers, and its private chats are encrypted.
The takedown followed a request from officials in New Delhi, and the notice Apple sent pointed to a statutory provision on prohibited material as well as the company’s own store rules, without identifying either the content or the reasoning behind it. The same design had already drawn scrutiny in July, when India’s cyber crime coordination centre sought limits on the app’s code repositories, warning that a build with no central chokepoint makes interception and attribution harder.
Apple said the app stays on sale in other markets, and that its test build has stopped working inside India.
