India Has Had Bitchat Pulled From Both App Stores. The App Needs No Servers, but It Still Needs a Store

Apple removed Bitchat from the Indian App Store on October 3 on the instruction of India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Jack Dorsey, who announced the app in July 2025, posted Apple's notice to X:

government of India officially removes bitchat from the App Store

By the same day the app had also gone from Google Play in India. Apple, Google and MeitY did not respond to requests for comment.

Apple's notice gave the legal basis as Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, and said the app includes content that is illegal in India. That was the whole of the explanation. It told the developer to take the matter up with the ministry directly. TestFlight distribution in India was disabled as well. Everywhere else, the app is untouched.

The one dependency the design did not remove

Bitchat is built to have nothing to seize. It runs over Bluetooth Low Energy mesh: every phone is both client and relay, messages hop device to device, and the project's own description of itself is "no internet, no servers, no phone numbers." Direct messages are end-to-end encrypted using the Noise Protocol Framework over Bluetooth, with the Nostr protocol as the long-range fallback. There are no accounts. No company holds a user table, which means there is no subscriber record to produce and no switch anyone can be told to flip.

That architecture has done its job. The app spikes under internet shutdowns — roughly 70,000 downloads in a week during Madagascar's September 2025 protests, about 50,000 in a single day in Nepal, with reported use in Uganda and Iran. In India it became a protest tool in its own right. During July's Jantar Mantar demonstrations in Delhi, India accounted for some 85 percent of the app's global downloads, and more than 330,000 users were active on July 23, its highest recorded usage in the country.

The removal does not break the mesh. Phones in India that already carry Bitchat keep working, and the protocol does not care what a store thinks of it. What the order does is shut the door in front of everyone who does not have it yet — and the moment people want it most is during a shutdown, when they cannot download anything. A messenger that only matters when the network is off has to be installed while the network is on. Take it off the stores and you have not switched it off; you have capped its population and set the ceiling in advance.

The two platforms are not equally affected. Android still permits installation from outside the Play Store. iOS in India offers no equivalent route, so for an iPhone, Apple's compliance is the entire question of availability.

Nobody outside the ministry can read the order

Section 69A allows the central government to direct the blocking of information on grounds including sovereignty, national security and public order. The Supreme Court upheld it in Shreya Singhal in 2015 as a narrowly drawn provision with procedural safeguards, among them a requirement that reasons be recorded in writing before a direction issues.

Rule 16 of the 2009 blocking rules then makes those requests and actions confidential. The reasons are written down and not shown. Orders are routinely withheld from Right to Information requests, the originator is frequently never notified, and, as a recent Verfassungsblog analysis of the regime puts it, without the order or its reasons "it becomes nearly impossible to challenge the decision or seek meaningful judicial review."

This is the part worth holding onto. Apple tells the developer to ask MeitY for details because Apple does not have them to give. MeitY is under no obligation to publish them. What is visible is only the effect: an app disappears from two stores in one country on one day, and the published justification runs to four words.

July was the rehearsal

October's order was not the first attempt. On July 23 — the same day the app hit its Indian peak — the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre directed GitHub to remove Bitchat's repositories, arguing that the design made it hard for law enforcement to intercept communications or trace users, that no subscriber details could be obtained, and that it could be used to coordinate during internet shutdowns and by "anti-national elements." That notice reached for the IT Act's offence provisions and aimed at the source code.

The October order reached for the blocking power instead, and aimed at the two places ordinary people get software. It is the cleaner instrument, and it required no argument about what the code does — only a demand to two companies that have Indian businesses to protect.

Developers of the next app like this one should read the sequence correctly. Removing the server removes one point of control. It does not remove the last one. A system is decentralised everywhere except the place where it is handed to the user, and that place is still owned by two firms in California.

Sources: TechCrunch: Jack Dorsey's Bitchat disappears from app stores in India after government order · ThePrint: Bitchat removed from Apple's India App Store following govt's demand · Inc42: Jack Dorsey's Bitchat goes offline in India, Apple cites MeitY order · Business Today: Apple removes Jack Dorsey's Bitchat from India App Store, cites MeitY order under IT Act · bitchat.free · GitHub: permissionlesstech/bitchat · Wikipedia: BitChat · Verfassungsblog: Blocked Without Explanation — How India's Blocking Regime Dilutes Safeguards and Expands Executive Power