Apple has succumbed to pressure from Russian authorities and removed several top iPhone VPN apps from the App Store in the country. The App Store team has been notifying VPN developers that their apps are being removed "per demand from Roskomnadzor," the state media watchdog that previously forced both Apple and Google to remove a political app backed by the country's opposition leader.
According to the Moscow Times, the Roskomnadzor regulator based its demand on the inclusion of "content that is illegal in Russia" within the apps. This move follows the regulator's increasing blocking of VPN services.
Details of Apple's App Store notifications come from emails sent to two VPN developers. However, according to Reuters, as many as 25 such firms have had their apps removed.
Reportedly, VPN usage increased dramatically in Russia following the start of the war with Ukraine. At that point, Russian authorities blocked access to several Western social media sites.
Virtual Private Networks are designed to encrypt a user's data for security reasons, but they also have the added benefit of disguising a user's location. Using one of these services, a user's location can't be tracked by the government. Once set up on an iPhone, the user can bypass local — or in this case, country-wide — restrictions on sites.