Apple Scrubbing App Store Of Iranian Apps, No Official Word As To Why

Reports have been coming in that apps made in and are submitted from Iran are being removed from Apple’s App Store. There has been no word from the iPhone maker as to why this is happening, although it is worth noting that the company has no official store in Iran. Instead, Apple found a workaround, which allowed some access to Iranians.

The people of Iran gained access to the Apple App Store last September in a limited capacity, Ubergizmo reports. Among the developers that listed their apps on the store included Digikala, which was an incredibly popular e-commerce app, which had users amounting to million. Several days ago, the app was removed from the store.

Techrasa was one of the first to cover the sudden disappearance of the massively popular app from the store, noting how some stringent regulations may be the cause of the removal of apps made by Iranians. The publication highlights how the people of Iran are crazy over gadgets, which makes the region a gold mine for app stores.

“There are 40M smartphones in the country and if you are wondering about the number of iPhones, there are 6M iPhones in the hands of Iranians right now,” Techrasa writes. “iPhone Market is that big to the point that we have reports of 100K smuggled iPhones each month into the country.”

When developers in the country try to upload the apps that they made to the App Store, however, they get a notification essentially telling them that the store isn’t available in the region. This is likely caused by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s regulations, which essentially blocks the market from receiving American goods and services, TechCrunch reports.

“Unfortunately, there is no App Store available for the territory of Iran,” the notification reads. “Additionally, apps facilitating transactions for businesses or entities based in Iran may not comply with the Iranian Transactions Sanctions Regulations (31CFR Part 560) when hosted on the App Store. For these reasons, we are unable to accept your application at this time. We encourage you to resubmit your application once international trade laws are revised to allow this functionality.”