Sorry, are you asking a clarifying question or trying to suggest that makes it OK?

You can just have multiple Google accounts on the same phone for different countries and switch to a different store this way.

Or people could sideload the app on their phone.

I think there’s a mandatory year’s delay before a second manual change is possible? At least I vaguely remember something like that back from when I moved. Google also recently force-switched me to the US (!) because that’s where the VPS provider I use to host a personal VPN is incorporated (but not where the VPS itself is located, funnily enough). So, not impossible, but not entirely trivial either. APKMirror or something similar sounds like a more viable approach. And Apple users are completely screwed from what I understand.

Two things of note, however:

- It’s all well and good fooling around with APKs (the devs aren’t completely opposed to just publishing them as files, either), but the primary value of the centralized repos is as a seed distribution mechanism for censorship circumvention: if something completely unforeseen happens and none of the pre-arranged responses work, you know you’ll just be able to push an update through the repo, and the Russian government would have to cripple most devices in the country to prevent that. That no longer holds.

(Google Docs was blocked via SNI sniffing on cellular networks for about half a day yesterday, though, so I’ll have to revise my estimates of what they’re willing to break.)

- The primary issue is tactical voting lists for the parliamentary election (they published them on Docs as well, see?). That election started this morning, Friday 17, and will end on Sunday 19. After that point most of this will be moot. So any approach that you can’t inform most of your users about in that time span is useless.

(This is in contrast to the protracted battles over Telegram some time ago, which took place over a couple of years.)

Curse the US polititians and press for promoting the “foreign election interference” meme, now US companies are forced to comply or the Russian government will be able to cry hypocrisy. The equivalence is invalid when considered in full, of course, but the slogan was “foreigner influencing elections = bad”, and with that level of detail it is valid. That’s the problem with slogans: they eliminate nuance.

(The EU slogan, “foreign tech company flouting local law = bad”, would also be exploitable here, but thankfully it didn’t penetrate that far. Note that I support most of the specific values of “law” this slogan was originally instantiated with!)