China has ordered Apple to remove Bitchat — the decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app created by Block CEO Jack Dorsey — from its China App Store, Dorsey revealed in an X post on Sunday. Apple told Dorsey that both the App Store listing and the TestFlight beta would no longer be available in China at the request of Beijing’s internet regulator, though the app remains downloadable elsewhere.
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said Bitchat breached rules governing online services with “public opinion or social mobilization capabilities,” a category that triggers mandatory security assessments before deployment. Apple complied with the regulator’s request, effectively blocking the app for mainland Chinese users while leaving global availability intact.
Bitchat stands out because it runs entirely over Bluetooth and mesh networks, requiring no internet connection. That architecture makes it difficult for authorities to censor or disable through traditional internet shutdowns and firewall filtering — a design that has helped it spread as a tool for communication during protests in countries including Madagascar, Uganda, Nepal, Indonesia, and Iran.
The app has been downloaded more than three million times across platforms, with over 92,000 installs in the past week alone; the Google Play Store separately reports more than one million registered downloads. The takedown in China highlights the tensions between censorship-resistant decentralised tools and national regulations aimed at controlling social mobilization — and signals how major platform operators like Apple navigate those pressures in different jurisdictions.
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
