> If an app is available in at least one App Store but remains unavailable in one or more App Stores, the ASM will mark that app as unavailable in those App Stores.
This doesn’t seem to take into account whether the apps were removed by Apple or never enabled for those countries by the app’s publisher.
However, more fundamentally: I also think we turn off the ability to download our app in some countries on Android... and yet I know that users can and do still install my app in those countries (hell: I want them to!!!) because Android almost always supports sideloading (and hell: the Google Play Store is often blocked in the most egregious counties anyway).
The real, underlying, ultimate issue is that, driven primarily by their greed, Apple has decided to create a centralized bottleneck on the deployment of applications to their platform, and so has--100% predictably: like this was ridiculously obvious when they started doing it what would happen, and they certainly are not so stupid to not now know in hindsight... they just don't care--become a tool of oppressive regimes to block and enforce the installation of software they dislike on people who happen to own an Apple device.
For a much wider and more general analysis of what is going on here, I highly recommend watching a talk I was giving a few years back called That's How You Get a Dystopia--the best version of which I did at Mozilla Privacy Lab (recording link below)--wherein I look at not only Apple, but the harms put upon users from centralization across the software industry, as well as discuss all the ways this also screws us even in counties that supposedly are quite liberal (as if nothing else, Apple is specifically extra-puritan, which causes a weird aftertaste of misogyny in their curation choices, such as causing Instagram to ban photos of people breastfeeding).
The Internet never cared about countries. Then Big Tech came with all this legacy horseshit of dividing and controlling individuals, grafted proprietary software onto the HTTP protocol to create what is effectively Cable TV 2.0, and marketed the hell out of it drowning out actual Internet culture.
It's the exact same attack other countercultural movements succumb to, but that doesn't mean we should just silently accept it.
However countries care about Apple and can affect its business, particularly if Apple doesn't obey local laws or regulations.
This is a little harder for Apple specifically, also selling hardware. But it would have been straightforward to spin the software store into a separate business, and they'd have been more robust for it.
But instead they fell back to all that legacy cruft, because it's what corporations know. And it's certainly lucrative to sell the fruits of freedom to authoritarian countries while filtering out the inconvenient parts. However the grassroots tech community should be denouncing them at every opportunity, rather than giving a pass to their corporate authoritarianism as if it in any way reflects Internet ideals.