Apple and Google's mobile app stores host Absher, an app from the Saudi government to help men in the country track and dictate where women can travel
Bill Bostock / Business Insider :
Context & Ripple Effects
The stores' own record makes the hosting decision conspicuous: weeks earlier, Apple and Google banned the anonymous commenting app Sarahah over bullying, proving both companies will pull apps that violate their conduct rules. Yet Absher stayed up, and a month later Google explicitly rejected calls to remove it from the Play Store.
The pattern cuts the other way too: a later investigation found Apple's App Stores for Saudi Arabia and China are missing the most apps, with LGBTQ+ apps censored there — so enforcement bends toward local governments rather than against them. Saudi Arabia has since widened its app-based control toolkit with Kollona Amn, launched in 2017 to let citizens inform on activists.
First-order effects
- Saudi men can monitor and dictate women's travel through an app distributed by the two dominant mobile platforms, giving state policy reach into every iPhone and Android handset in the country.
- Apple and Google are immediately cast as distributors of a gender-control tool, forcing them to defend hosting decisions against their own published conduct standards.
Second-order effects
- Google's refusal to delist Absher sets a precedent other governments can cite when pressing the stores to host their own monitoring apps, including citizen-informant tools like Kollona Amn.
- The contrast with Sarahah's ban exposes inconsistent enforcement: apps are removed for user-to-user harm but retained when the harm is state-directed, pushing activists and advertisers to judge the stores by their regional behavior, not their global policies.
Third-order effects
- App stores harden into de facto arbiters of which state surveillance and social-control tools reach citizens, with each government's leverage — market size, regulatory threats — determining outcomes rather than any uniform rulebook.
- If the pattern holds, platform governance splits along national lines, echoing the finding that Apple's Saudi and Chinese storefronts already censor the most apps, and making sideloading and circumvention apps the pressure valve for users inside restrictive systems.
The trend: Mobile app stores are becoming geopolitical gatekeepers whose content rules flex to accommodate state power, leaving enforcement shaped more by the government involved than by the platform's stated policies.