Another way these app stores enable censorship is by having arcane and inscrutable review processes, where they often ban your app for no reason with no recourse (unless you know a Googler or Apple employee, who can investigate).

For example, we work with Aween Rayeh [1], an app that provides real-time traffic information about Israeli checkpoints in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The author's account was banned for no reason at all on Google Play [2]. There was no means to get an appeal or a review.

What typically we see happening is that someone internally at these companies issues a ban for what we assume are ideological reasons. Then when someone looks into it there's no actual reason for the ban to have happened, and it sails through. We see similar thing with shadow banning on social media: someone gets hard flagged and their account is completely shut down, and then when someone looks into it, there was never a reason to do it in the first place.

[1] https://www.aweenrayeh.com/ [2] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/thre...