Apple has hidden more than two dozen VPN clients from the Russian App Store at the request of Roskomnadzor, according to the Apple Censorship portal and the Durov Code portal. The developers of one of the applications published a letter from Apple, in which the corporation notifies that the application is hidden in the Russian region because it "contains content that is illegal in Russia." Roskomnadzor issued the requirement on the basis of paragraph 7 of Article 15.1 of Federal Law No. 149 "On Information" (maintaining a register of prohibited resources). Already installed applications will continue to work, but it is no longer possible to update them or download them to new users in Russia. When you change the account region, they become available again. Similar software remains in Google Play for now.
The removal included applications designed for routing and proxying traffic, and not full-fledged VPN services with their own servers. The user had to download the configurations themselves.
Apple complies with the requirements of local regulators based on the App Store rules, which require developers to comply with the laws of the countries where the application is distributed. In this case, the basis was the order of Roskomnadzor, referring to the register of prohibited information.
At the same time, the applications themselves do not violate Russian law — the use of VPN in Russia is not prohibited. The removal only affected the Russian region of the App Store. Technically, this is implemented through geo-blocking by Apple ID, linked to a Russian card or region.
In Google Play, similar applications remain available at the time of publication. Google's policy regarding regional blocking differs: the company is more likely to block specific applications by court order, rather than preemptively removing entire categories.