Roskomnadzor mistakenly removed a harmless app from the AppStore, in the wake of the latest purges

To be honest, I always had a suspicion about the adequacy of the employees of this department, and here the suspicion turned into a certainty that the people sitting in the offices are not very gifted. Or not very attentive!

This is how I see it!

A typical working day for an RKN employee looks like whiskey and rock-n-roll. It's hard to explain their decisions and actions any other way!

Someone saw my articles on creating and developing a reverse VPN (Ru VPN) for those who have moved and traveled to access government resources abroad, pay the same utilities. All servers are located in the Russian Federation and access to blocked resources is regulated by hosting providers. In other words, you will not be able to use “no-no-no”, it will not open, as well as other interesting content. Our users have problems of a completely different kind, how not to lose connection with the Russian Federation and use the necessary resources specifically in the Russian Federation.

There is another use case. New regions of Russia received territorial affiliation and a Russian passport, but not access to resources like Gosuslugi. Surreal? For me, it certainly is! I have a lot of such users!

By the way, this application did not have foreign servers to go outside, as can be seen in the images, the application did not solve the problem of bypassing the blocking of prohibited content. The description of the application clearly indicated what it was intended for.

Application screens

I didn't even invest in advertising, many users came from search. They also came from recommendations from others, we worked in conditions where competitors were powerless. For example, did you know that WireGuard doesn't work in Egypt? I didn't know, at the start I had WG implemented (with the TunnelKit library under the GPL license, David da Rosa, the author of which kindly allowed its use in the application when publishing in the App Store). To solve the problem of the operability of known protocols in problematic countries, I implemented protocols of the v2ray subspecies, namely VLESS and Trojan, and the option of switching connection types such as simple TCP and WebSocket, as well as “xtls-vision” with XTLS-Reality support was supported.

It would seem, what could go wrong?

But it went anyway… Not long ago I received a “letter of happiness” from Apple that this application would be removed from the Russian segment of the App Store in accordance with the demand of Roskomnadzor, based on the requirements of the Federal Law of 27.07.2006 No. 149-FZ, paragraph 7, article 15.1.

Notice from Apple

WTF?! This basis states that “Immediately from the moment of receiving notification from the registry operator about the inclusion of a domain name and (or) a web page pointer of an Internet site in the registry, the hosting provider is obliged to inform the owner of the Internet site it serves about this and notify him of the need to remove the Internet page containing information, the distribution of which is prohibited in the Russian Federation.” How can this be applied to this application?

Later, information appeared with the list cleaned by RKN. On the one hand, it's nice that you were “mixed” in one group with big business, which means you're not so small anymore. On the other hand, what about us?

List of applications from the latest “mix”

How could this happen?

Honestly, one can only guess. In my understanding, this is a false association with an Android app with the same name that solves the opposite problems. Otherwise, how could this project be associated with violations of the VPN law?

The second option is more surreal, but nevertheless real… It's absolutely random! Open the App Store, make a random selection of applications with the word VPN in the name and write a requirement. If so, then drive them out “like piss rags” from their warm and comfortable places. How can an employee who doesn't read the description and doesn't understand the principle of the application ensure the requirements of Federal Law No. 149?!

Will this affect the project?

Absolutely! I'm expecting a regression in a couple of months (1/3-1/4 of all Russian accounts), then growth will follow, but not tied to Russian accounts. Users abroad, not immediately, but change the regional affiliation of their accounts.

The app itself is alive, and perhaps it will eventually return to the Russian segment of the app store. We'll see!

What's the bottom line?

RKN sent a simple letter that they excluded the application from the FGIS. Even in this form, no one even thought to apologize. Well, now I am busy entertaining myself by corresponding with this department, since I need an official document to return to the Russian App Store.

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