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Comment by RandallBrown | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how this shows censorship. It just shows you if an app is available in China.

Lots of apps aren't available in China or outside of where the developer is based.

Some people and groups have quite the axe to grind, and the buzzword guaranteed to work in this crowd is “censorship” so that’s what they’re calling it. Never mind who is actually doing the censoring, or where censorship and curation part ways. It’s emotive language designed to inflame passions at the expense of reason.

It's also a really, really, really hard line to draw. Lots of countries have laws and regulations that may require a company to withdraw apps from an app store. If you had a Wolfenstein game in your app store, you'd have to "censor" it in the German app store. China is especially censorious and authoritarian, but your only options are (a) don't do business at all in an especially censorious and authoritarian country, thereby censoring all of the apps, or (b) censor the apps the government wants you to censor, which is what you already have to do in lots of other countries anyway.

In this case, it isn't Apple censorship. But even if Apple was the one to pull an app due to a country's local laws, we can't expect Apple to start refusing removal requests when it threatens the app store (or worse, Apple products) being banned in the entire country.

This site allows you to compare with other countries too. Search for VPN, Communism, Privacy. Try Brazil, Argentina, even Russia. Results are mostly similar to US.

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