What is censored in Iran?

Of the apps we have tested here that have at least 10,000 user ratings worldwide and are still on sale somewhere, the share you cannot get here. Both sides of the fraction are what we tested in this storefront, so an app we have not tested here is in neither and cannot move the figure either way — which is the whole reason this is a share and not a count. Nothing about how widely an app is distributed enters it, so an app sold in one other storefront counts exactly as much as one sold in all 217.

564 of the 1,319 widely-used apps we have tested here are unavailable — 42.8%. · median 18.4%

This correlates 0.51 with how many apps we have tested here — better than a raw count of missing apps, slightly worse than the fixed-basket count it replaced, because which widely-used apps we happened to test here is not a random sample of them. Its other weakness is shared by every version of this measure: a region-locked app is missing from nearly every storefront, so about three-quarters of a typical share is a floor almost everyone stands on. That is why the middle of the ranking is much flatter than its ends, and why a rank in the middle should not be read as a finding.

Measured Oct 9, 2026

429 widely-used apps are missing here, sorted by what they are. Every one is classified from its name and Google’s own category, so nothing is left out and nothing depends on a list being kept up to date: 106 of the 429 fall into a kind we defined — VPNs, news, messaging, privacy tools and so on — and the rest are shown under Google’s own category. Within each kind the most-reviewed apps come first, because the point is which apps people actually use.

Each kind is shown twice over: the apps in it people actually use, and the same apps by when they went. Of the 429, we watched 16 disappear from this storefront, 4 of them in the last year. The rest have been absent for as long as we have been testing here, which is a different thing from having been removed and is shown as such.

Names are matched conservatively, and the misses are the deliberate kind: an app called "IP Location Changer" is a VPN and is caught by name, while a privacy browser is filed under privacy rather than VPN. Google’s category is used wherever it is the better answer — every news app it labels `News` is one, whereas a name rule for "news" also catches a football-scores app and a jobs board. Dates are when we last saw an app available here, and we have been testing this storefront since — anything that went before then is counted as missing but not as removed.