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From their methodology section: > 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 ap

From their methodology section: > 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. This doesn’t seem to take into account whether the apps were removed by Apple or never enabled for those countries by the app’s publisher.

machello13 5y ago
Right, are the researchers aware that devs can choose which countries their apps appear in? Seems like a really basic thing to miss.
- felipemesquita 5y ago
  The ‘least available’ app in their analysis is unavailable in most regions, including places like Germany, Sweden and Denmark, which I don’t think is due to any kind of censorship from those governments.
saurik 5y ago
And yet, interestingly, developers removing their own apps is also Apple's fault in the end, for two reasons: one proximal, and the other ultimate. I work on an app that helps you bypass firewalls, and so it is illegal in China. I am pretty sure I would get in trouble with Apple if I allowed it to be downloaded in China, so I turn off the ability to download it in counties where I know I am not allowed to market it... if you thereby told me that every one of these apps was turned off by the developer, I would not be surprised. However, more fundamentally: I also think we turn off the ability to download our app in some countries on Android... and yet I know that users can and do still install my app in those countries (hell: I want them to!!!) because Android almost always supports sideloading (and hell: the Google Play Store is often blocked in the most egregious counties anyway). The real, underlying, ultimate issue is that, driven primarily by their greed, Apple has decided to create a centralized bottleneck on the deployment of applications to their platform, and so has--100% predictably: like this was ridiculously obvious when they started doing it what would happen, and they certainly are not so stupid to not now know in hindsight... they just don't care--become a tool of oppressive regimes to block and enforce the installation of software they dislike on people who happen to own an Apple device. For a much wider and more general analysis of what is going on here, I highly recommend watching a talk I was giving a few years back called That's How You Get a Dystopia--the best version of which I did at Mozilla Privacy Lab (recording link below)--wherein I look at not only Apple, but the harms put upon users from centralization across the software industry, as well as discuss all the ways this also screws us even in counties that supposedly are quite liberal (as if nothing else, Apple is specifically extra-puritan, which causes a weird aftertaste of misogyny in their curation choices, such as causing Instagram to ban photos of people breastfeeding). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsazo-Gs7ms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsazo-Gs7ms
- mindslight 5y ago
  The real WTF is Apple setting up a list of countries in the first place. There should be no list of "block downloads in these countries" feature, because there should be no record of what country any given account "belongs to". The Internet never cared about countries. Then Big Tech came with all this legacy horseshit of dividing and controlling individuals, grafted proprietary software onto the HTTP protocol to create what is effectively Cable TV 2.0, and marketed the hell out of it drowning out actual Internet culture. It's the exact same attack other countercultural movements succumb to, but that doesn't mean we should just silently accept it.
  - musicale 5y ago
    > The Internet never cared about countries However countries care about Apple and can affect its business, particularly if Apple doesn't obey local laws or regulations.
    - mindslight 5y ago
      The vast majority of this is opt-in on Apple's (et al) part. They could have also chosen to offer their products "as is", and leave it up to foreign countries to firewall or not. This is a little harder for Apple specifically, also selling hardware. But it would have been straightforward to spin the software store into a separate business, and they'd have been more robust for it. But instead they fell back to all that legacy cruft, because it's what corporations know. And it's certainly lucrative to sell the fruits of freedom to authoritarian countries while filtering out the inconvenient parts. However the grassroots tech community should be denouncing them at every opportunity, rather than giving a pass to their corporate authoritarianism as if it in any way reflects Internet ideals.

machello13 5y ago

Right, are the researchers aware that devs can choose which countries their apps appear in? Seems like a really basic thing to miss.

felipemesquita 5y ago
The ‘least available’ app in their analysis is unavailable in most regions, including places like Germany, Sweden and Denmark, which I don’t think is due to any kind of censorship from those governments.

saurik 5y ago

And yet, interestingly, developers removing their own apps is also Apple's fault in the end, for two reasons: one proximal, and the other ultimate. I work on an app that helps you bypass firewalls, and so it is illegal in China. I am pretty sure I would get in trouble with Apple if I allowed it to be downloaded in China, so I turn off the ability to download it in counties where I know I am not allowed to market it... if you thereby told me that every one of these apps was turned off by the developer, I would not be surprised. However, more fundamentally: I also think we turn off the ability to download our app in some countries on Android... and yet I know that users can and do still install my app in those countries (hell: I want them to!!!) because Android almost always supports sideloading (and hell: the Google Play Store is often blocked in the most egregious counties anyway). The real, underlying, ultimate issue is that, driven primarily by their greed, Apple has decided to create a centralized bottleneck on the deployment of applications to their platform, and so has--100% predictably: like this was ridiculously obvious when they started doing it what would happen, and they certainly are not so stupid to not now know in hindsight... they just don't care--become a tool of oppressive regimes to block and enforce the installation of software they dislike on people who happen to own an Apple device. For a much wider and more general analysis of what is going on here, I highly recommend watching a talk I was giving a few years back called That's How You Get a Dystopia--the best version of which I did at Mozilla Privacy Lab (recording link below)--wherein I look at not only Apple, but the harms put upon users from centralization across the software industry, as well as discuss all the ways this also screws us even in counties that supposedly are quite liberal (as if nothing else, Apple is specifically extra-puritan, which causes a weird aftertaste of misogyny in their curation choices, such as causing Instagram to ban photos of people breastfeeding). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsazo-Gs7ms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsazo-Gs7ms

mindslight 5y ago
The real WTF is Apple setting up a list of countries in the first place. There should be no list of "block downloads in these countries" feature, because there should be no record of what country any given account "belongs to". The Internet never cared about countries. Then Big Tech came with all this legacy horseshit of dividing and controlling individuals, grafted proprietary software onto the HTTP protocol to create what is effectively Cable TV 2.0, and marketed the hell out of it drowning out actual Internet culture. It's the exact same attack other countercultural movements succumb to, but that doesn't mean we should just silently accept it.
- musicale 5y ago
  > The Internet never cared about countries However countries care about Apple and can affect its business, particularly if Apple doesn't obey local laws or regulations.
  - mindslight 5y ago
    The vast majority of this is opt-in on Apple's (et al) part. They could have also chosen to offer their products "as is", and leave it up to foreign countries to firewall or not. This is a little harder for Apple specifically, also selling hardware. But it would have been straightforward to spin the software store into a separate business, and they'd have been more robust for it. But instead they fell back to all that legacy cruft, because it's what corporations know. And it's certainly lucrative to sell the fruits of freedom to authoritarian countries while filtering out the inconvenient parts. However the grassroots tech community should be denouncing them at every opportunity, rather than giving a pass to their corporate authoritarianism as if it in any way reflects Internet ideals.