India blocks Jack Dorsey's Bitchat from its app stores
Apple and Google have pulled the offline mesh-messaging app in India after a Section 69A blocking order, and Dorsey says it remains available everywhere else.
Bitchat, Jack Dorsey's offline messaging app, has disappeared from India's app stores after the country's government ordered its removal. Dorsey said on Saturday that India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had told Apple to take the app off the App Store in the country, and shared Apple's notice on X. The notice cited Section 69A of India's Information Technology Act, the provision the government uses to order online blocking.
Apple told Dorsey that the app would stay on its App Store outside India, but that access through TestFlight, its beta-testing service, would also be blocked inside the country. Bitchat was gone from Google Play in India as well, and its website was unreachable across several Indian internet providers. It is not yet clear whether Google and the internet providers received their own orders; Apple, Google and India's IT ministry did not comment.
Why India is targeting the app
Bitchat launched in July last year and uses Bluetooth mesh networking, letting nearby phones swap encrypted messages without mobile data, an internet connection or central servers. That design is precisely what worries Indian authorities: the government's earlier order to GitHub said the app's architecture made it hard for law enforcement to intercept messages or trace users, and pointed to its ability to keep working during internet shutdowns. Interest in the app surged in India during protests in July, when the country accounted for about 85 per cent of its global downloads in a single week.
Rights groups push back
The July action relied on a law covering intermediaries and their liability for third-party content, whereas the new order invokes Section 69A. The Internet Freedom Foundation, a New Delhi digital-rights group, called the latest order unconstitutional, arguing that Section 69A lets the government block unlawful information rather than a whole messaging app because it can operate during shutdowns, and noting that neither the order nor the allegedly unlawful content behind it has been published. The removal landed as India saw a fresh wave of youth-led protests over changes to its voter rolls, with internet services suspended around one demonstration in New Delhi.
Our opinion
Blocking an app because it keeps working when the internet goes down is an admission about India's playbook, not a security measure. Section 69A was written to take down specific unlawful content; stretching it to an entire messaging client, and refusing to publish either the order or the offending material, is the kind of move that makes a censorship law look like a tool for managing protests rather than protecting anyone. It is also unlikely to work. Mesh apps such as Bitchat and Briar exist precisely for the shutdowns Indian authorities keep reaching for, and every attempt to block them advertises them more widely — the July takedown demand to GitHub seeded the very interest the government now wants to suppress. If Delhi wants to be taken seriously about illegal content, it should say what the content was and use a provision that fits. If it wants to silence the squares before the next march, this will not be the last app it has to chase.