First-order effects

• Apple keeps its Russian market instead of exiting over the pre-install law, but every new iPhone sold there now surfaces a state-curated list of local apps at setup — a compliance step confirmed weeks later when the prompt went live on iOS.
• Russian regulators gain a proven playbook for reaching citizens through hardware makers rather than through their own blocked or domestic platforms.

Second-order effects

• Google and other foreign smartphone and OS vendors operating in Russia face the same demand under the same statute, ending the era where Apple could hold out as the exception.
• Other authoritarian governments can cite Russia's success to negotiate identical prompts or pre-installs, converting one bilateral concession into a negotiating standard across markets.

Third-order effects

• The concession deepens into personnel-level leverage: Russia's follow-on requirement that foreign tech firms employ locally prosecutable operatives preceded pressure that likely drove the removal of Navalny's app — showing compliance begets further demands.
• If the pattern holds, app stores function as de facto chokepoints of state power worldwide, with platform operators forced to choose per-country between market access and content neutrality — a structural shift regulators in democratic markets may also study.