Hacker News Reader

Comment by amingilani | Hacker News Reader

Please note that while Apple itself may censor applications in regions, creators of the apps may choose to limit their distributions as well. For example: Bank of America's mobile banking app isn't available in Pakistan where I currently am, but this website wouldn't differentiate between that type of censorship or Apple's censorship.

But, personally, I still think this is a great idea!

View on HN

I would hesitate to call that "censorship" at all. Some apps simply aren't relevant in a country because they're associated with a physical service which doesn't exist there. For example, a number of food delivery apps (like Uber Eats and Grubhub) don't operate in China, and as such have chosen to not make their app available there.

And nobody ever leaves the country. Or if they do, they're totally willing to go through the entire giant hassle of switching their account for a few days.

Yeah, that's how I found out BotA didn't distribute their app in Pakistan

That's a pain in the ass, but it's not censorship.

Then take that up with the individual app developer.

It has nothing to do with Apple or censorship.

I was objecting to the statement that some apps are not relevant in those countries.

You have to specifically go into settings and change your app store country

At a guess, restricting an area-specific app to its service area diminishes the number of unanswerable support questions and one-star reviews by people outside the service area.

Pity for expats (like me).

App Store search is at least partly to blame for this too. For example Uber is available in France but of course it does not work in all cities. The countries is just a larger version of the same thing.

Ideally apps that have regional restrictions should be able to declare that and then when you do a search it would not show results outside of the scope unless you searched for the exact name or enabled outside of region search.

Users are partly to blame too, selling an untranslated app in France will bring down tons of 1 star reviews specifically calling out lack of French version. I suppose some developers just decide to not deal with that and retire the app from the store.

I've published a few apps that run the same platform on different countries with different branding (name, logo, theme, etc.)

I had to restrict each of them to their own country (i.e. preventing German users from reaching the French app), otherwise during the app-store submission reviews, the reviewer would reject us because according to them the app being reviewed is a ripoff of the other apps of the same account.

It's like:

    Your app "Gmail UK" is a ripoff of another app of the store: "Gmail US".

Fun times.

This was the point I was about to make, some apps don't want users all over the world due to country limitations.

The app specifically says "United States" and "China". There is no comparison with other countries. As a result i would guess it only checks those two countries' app store page

Doesn’t this tool focus on removals? Ie app was deployed but then not available.

No, it does not. As far as I can tell, it's simply comparing search results for the two countries -- apps which have never been distributed in China will still appear in red. Try searching for "Uber Eats", for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com