India cuts off downloads of Bitchat, the messenger built to work through internet shutdowns

On Friday, authorities suspended internet services around New Delhi's Jantar Mantar for 12 hours during a fresh wave of youth-led protests over changes to India's voter rolls ^[14]. Bitchat is built for those hours. It passes encrypted messages between nearby phones over Bluetooth mesh networking, with no cell network, internet connection or central server involved ^[8].

Teams building tools like this tend to tell themselves that an app which works offline is safe from a shutdown. The download data suggests users in India did something narrower: they installed Bitchat when the shutdowns arrived. Sensor Tower's figures are downloads, the step the new order targets. According to Sensor Tower, about 85% of Bitchat's downloads worldwide from July 17 to July 23 came from India, compared with roughly 1% over the 30 days before that ^[16].

An install runs through a store, and a government can reach a store. Apple's notice, which Dorsey posted on X, puts the Indian IT ministry's demand under Section 69A, the country's main provision for government-ordered blocking ^[3]. Bitchat stays on the App Store outside India ^[4]. The TestFlight block also shuts the beta-testing channel a developer could otherwise use to get builds to testers inside the country ^[4].

Of the orders on the record, only Apple's names Section 69A ^[3]. TechCrunch could not establish whether Google or internet providers had received any direction ^[6], so the Play Store removal cannot yet be tied to that law or to any order. Apple, Google and the IT ministry did not respond to requests for comment ^[7].

For a team shipping a communication product into India, the planning tool is a 2x2. One axis asks whether the app needs the team's own servers once it is on a phone. The other asks whether a new user needs someone else's store or code host to get it. Bitchat answers no to the first and yes to the second. In that corner there is no server to block, so the government's orders have gone to GitHub and Apple ^[9][3].

The forcing function is a table with one row for each channel a new user in the country can install from. Each row records who would receive an order, under which law, and whether the developer would hear about it. I'd weight the rows with no documented order most heavily, since there is nothing to contest, though planning around them means preparing for removals no one has explained. Filled in for Bitchat in India, three rows hold a documented order: GitHub, the App Store and TestFlight ^[1]. Two hold an app that is unavailable with no order on the record: Google Play and the website ^[1].