Amid the removal of Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat from app stores in India following the IT Ministry’s order, government sources on Tuesday said the Bluetooth messaging app was a law-and-order concern and therefore had to be removed.
Apple has officially removed the offline messaging application from its India App Store after a demand from the country’s IT ministry, Jack Dorsey said in an X post on Saturday. The app has also been pulled down from the Google Play Store. At that time, the Home Ministry’s cybercrime arm, the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, had ordered Microsoft subsidiary GitHub to remove Bitchat.
The app’s removal was “per demand from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY)” and because “it includes content that is illegal in India”, according to Apple’s latest notice shared by Dorsey in his recent post. That particular section, the notice said, requires apps to follow all legal requirements in any location where they are offered. It says developers are responsible for understanding and complying with local laws, beyond Apple’s own guidelines.
MeitY issued the takedown demand under Section 69(A) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, according to the post.
The Apple notice said the developer of the app can contact the ministry directly for more information about the removal or about Indian laws and requirements. The app remains available in the App Stores of other territories selected in App Store Connect, Apple said. Since communications occur directly between nearby devices through a decentralised mesh network, the platform could be misused to evade lawful surveillance, facilitate anonymous coordination, and circumvent lawful restrictions imposed by competent authorities during situations involving public disorder, riots, terrorism, organised crime, or internet shutdowns, according to I4C.
