If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Apple deleted Bitchat from the China App Store, acting on a direct order from the Cyberspace Administration of China. Jack Dorsey, who created the app, posted a screenshot of Apple’s removal notice to X with a short caption: “bitchat pulled from the china app store.” The notice Apple sent to Dorsey is almost a copy-paste of the one it sent to Damus three years earlier. The language is identical. The accusation is identical. The CAC determined that Bitchat violates Articles 3 of the Provisions on the Security Assessment of Internet-based Information Services with Attribute of Public Opinions or Capable of Social Mobilization. That regulation, enacted in 2018, requires any online service capable of influencing public opinion or organizing collective action to undergo a government security assessment before going live. If a service hasn’t submitted to that assessment, the CAC can order it pulled. It targets the capacity for “public opinions” and “social mobilization.” The Chinese government has decided that the ability to communicate outside state-approved channels is itself a security threat, and Apple consistently treats that determination as sufficient grounds for deletion. Bitchat is a peer-to-peer messaging app that operates over Bluetooth mesh networks. It requires no internet connection, no phone number, no email address, and no user account. Messages are end-to-end encrypted and stored only on the devices involved. There are no central servers to subpoena, no user databases to hand over, and no content moderation pipeline for the CAC to plug into. Dorsey built the initial version over a single weekend in July 2025, coding it with Goose, Block’s open-source AI assistant. He published a white paper on GitHub and opened a TestFlight beta that hit its 10,000-user cap within hours. That design is precisely the problem from Beijing’s perspective. China’s internet censorship apparatus depends on having a chokepoint. WeChat, the country’s dominant messaging platform, has censorship tools baked into its architecture. The government can monitor conversations, flag keywords, and delete content before users even see it. Bitchat offers none of those control surfaces. The app makes censorship structurally impossible on a technical level because there is nothing between sender and receiver for the state to intercept, filter, or read. The app had already proved its usefulness in exactly the scenarios that make governments nervous. Protesters in Madagascar downloaded it 70,000 times in a single week during September 2025. Nepalese users pulled down nearly 50,000 copies on September 8 alone, after their government shut down social networks during anti-corruption demonstrations. Downloads spiked in Uganda and Iran during internet blackouts in January 2026. Dorsey noted publicly that Russia was at one point the app’s largest user base by country, as citizens looked for alternatives to state-surveilled messaging platforms. Apple’s compliance with the removal order was, as usual, immediate and without public comment beyond the boilerplate notification to the developer. The notice told Dorsey that his app “includes content that is illegal in China, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.” Apple cited Section 5 (Legal) of those guidelines, which requires apps to comply with local laws. Apple has refined this process into a routine. When the CAC ordered WhatsApp, Threads, Signal, and Telegram removed from the China App Store in April 2024, Apple complied and issued a statement saying, “We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree.” The company has removed VPN apps, news apps, a Quran app, and tens of thousands of games from its China storefront over the past several years, all at government request. Apple positions itself publicly as a defender of privacy and an advocate for human rights. The company’s own human rights commitment states that it believes in “the critical importance of an open society in which information flows freely.” And yet Apple functions as the enforcement arm of the CAC’s censorship decisions whenever those decisions concern the Chinese market. The company doesn’t challenge the orders. It doesn’t delay. Apple controls the only door into every iPhone on the planet. Unlike Android, which allows users to install software from the web or third-party stores, iOS locks app distribution to the App Store. Apple decides what gets listed, what stays, and what disappears. That makes every removal order from a government functionally absolute for anyone using an iPhone in that country. When the CAC told Apple to pull Bitchat, it wasn’t asking Apple to remove one option among many. It was asking Apple to cut off access entirely, and Apple had the architectural power to do exactly that. No sideloading, no alternative storefront, no workaround short of jailbreaking the device or having already installed the app before the order came through. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Apple Removes Bitchat from China App Store at Cyberspace Administration Order appeared first on Reclaim The Net.