What we mean by censorship

The claim

Google Play keeps 217 separate country catalogues and assigns you to exactly one, by the country on your Google account. What that catalogue will offer you is not what another will. There is nowhere on earth Play offers everything: even the best-served country is missing 3.2% of the widely-used apps we have tested there, and the typical one is missing 15.5%.

We call this censorship. Not because we know why each app is missing — usually nobody outside Google does — but because the effect is that a person is refused software on the basis of where they live, by a mechanism one company built, operates and does not disclose. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects the freedom to seek and receive information “regardless of frontiers”. Google Play is organised entirely around frontiers.

An app can be missing because Google removed it, because a government or court demanded it, because the developer never offered it there, or by mistake. Those are different acts with different culprits, and we say which one it was whenever anyone has put it on the record. But all four run through the same machinery, and Google built the machinery: without a system of per-country catalogues, none of the four could geographically partition anyone's access to anything.

But Android lets you sideload

It does, and that is a real difference from the iPhone. Android will install software from outside Play — from another store, or from a file you downloaded — and we are not going to pretend otherwise in order to make the argument tidier.

It does not answer the finding, for a plain reason: you cannot go and find an app you have never been told is missing. Play shows you a catalogue with no gaps in it. Nothing marks the absences, no page lists them, and search returns nothing rather than “not offered here”. Sideloading is only an escape for a person who already knows the specific thing they are looking for, which is precisely the knowledge the catalogue is built not to give them. That is the gap this site exists to fill, and every page of it is a list of what you were not told.

It is also a narrowing escape. From 30 September 2026 in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, apps from developers who have not registered an identity with Google stop installing through the participating app stores on certified Android devices, with a global rollout announced for 2027. Sideloading survives it — through a one-time advanced flow, and through the developer bridge — and Google has said plainly that sideloading is not going away. But the escape route is being paved, signposted and fitted with a gate, by the same company that decides the catalogue you are escaping. Google’s developer verification guide

What an open internet looks like

Nothing else on the internet works this way. Registering a domain involves no set of boxes to tick deciding which countries may reach it. Google does not keep a per-country list of websites Chrome is permitted to load — it will fetch any address you type, from anywhere, and Google has never suggested it should be otherwise. Google Search will even find you the app it will not sell you.

So the gate is not a property of computers, of phones, or of the law. It is a decision about app distribution, and Google made it. Android permits software from any source, which is Google's own demonstration that the platform never required a gate — the partition exists inside Play, where Google chose to put it.

Restriction belongs at the payment, not the download

Territorial law does bind some things. Gambling is licensed jurisdiction by jurisdiction; so are some financial services. Google cannot be expected to take a payment that is unlawful where the payer lives, and we do not ask it to.

But a payment is not a download. The regulated industry this argument leans on hardest has already demonstrated the alternative: sports betting is licensed state by state in the United States, Play's catalogues have no concept of a state, so the apps are installable across the whole country and verify location at the moment of the wager. It works, at scale, in the most heavily regulated category there is, inside Google's own store. Streaming services do the same with territorial licences — Spotify's catalogue differs by country and the Spotify app is installable nearly everywhere. The licence constrains what is inside the app, not whether the app exists for you.

And the commerce argument only ever reaches the apps that charge. The overwhelming majority of what is missing is free to install — no payment, no tax, no licence for territorial commerce law to attach to — so whatever removed it, a rule about selling is not the explanation. Where an app costs nothing, the restriction has been placed on the download itself, which is the thing that needed justifying.

The part that is not arguable

Google publishes no record of app availability. There is no list, no API, and no page in Play that tells you what it is not showing you. Our record holds 41,829 country readings where an app could not be got, and Google has published an account of none of them.

Google does publish something, and it is worth being exact about what. Its Transparency Report counts the requests governments send it to remove content, by country, by product and by the reason given, and reports how often it complied. Play sits in that report among the other products. What the report does not contain is a count of apps removed from Play in a country, the reason any particular app was removed, or the name of a single app in any period. Apple, for all that this project's sister site says about it, publishes more here than Google does: a per-storefront removal count with the specific statute behind each. Google's disclosure is about correspondence received, not about catalogues served, and the two cannot be joined. Google’s Transparency Report

That gap is why this project exists. We query Play's own catalogue for every app in every country, publish every reading with its date, and let anyone re-run any test from their own browser and check our answer against Google's.

What we cannot show

Our readings show that an app cannot be got in a country and that it is still available in others. They do not show intent. A developer's market decision and a government's demand look identical from outside, which is why no cause appears anywhere on this site without a citation. Two further limits are worth knowing: 86% of the unavailable readings we hold were never preceded by a reading that found the app available there, because this monitor began in November 2023 and anything withdrawn before then looks the same to us as something never offered; and our headline measure selects apps by worldwide user ratings, which is a poor instrument for exactly the apps censorship targets most precisely, since an app serving a persecuted minority is small by definition.

If you think we are wrong

The definition is worth arguing about and we would rather have the argument than avoid it. The facts are not up for argument: if a page here states or implies something you can correct — a removal that was your own decision, a reason we have missed, a reading that is wrong — tell us and we will publish the correction.

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