No, if (and only if) your Google Play region is set to Russia, the app isn’t accessible, not even via a direct link. This is how a local ban works: while it isn’t strictly speaking deletion as the files are manifestly still on Google’s servers, the users from the relevant country are locked out.
I think there’s a mandatory year’s delay before a second manual change is possible? At least I vaguely remember something like that back from when I moved. Google also recently force-switched me to the US (!) because that’s where the VPS provider I use to host a personal VPN is incorporated (but not where the VPS itself is located, funnily enough). So, not impossible, but not entirely trivial either. APKMirror or something similar sounds like a more viable approach. And Apple users are completely screwed from what I understand.
Two things of note, however:
- It’s all well and good fooling around with APKs (the devs aren’t completely opposed to just publishing them as files, either), but the primary value of the centralized repos is as a seed distribution mechanism for censorship circumvention: if something completely unforeseen happens and none of the pre-arranged responses work, you know you’ll just be able to push an update through the repo, and the Russian government would have to cripple most devices in the country to prevent that. That no longer holds.
(Google Docs was blocked via SNI sniffing on cellular networks for about half a day yesterday, though, so I’ll have to revise my estimates of what they’re willing to break.)
- The primary issue is tactical voting lists for the parliamentary election (they published them on Docs as well, see?). That election started this morning, Friday 17, and will end on Sunday 19. After that point most of this will be moot. So any approach that you can’t inform most of your users about in that time span is useless.
(This is in contrast to the protracted battles over Telegram some time ago, which took place over a couple of years.)
Curse the US polititians and press for promoting the “foreign election interference” meme, now US companies are forced to comply or the Russian government will be able to cry hypocrisy. The equivalence is invalid when considered in full, of course, but the slogan was “foreigner influencing elections = bad”, and with that level of detail it is valid. That’s the problem with slogans: they eliminate nuance.
(The EU slogan, “foreign tech company flouting local law = bad”, would also be exploitable here, but thankfully it didn’t penetrate that far. Note that I support most of the specific values of “law” this slogan was originally instantiated with!)
See my response above: timing is crucial in this instance. A clever workaround that takes more than three days to propagate is useless.
As another matter of timing, note that Apple (for which no such easy workarounds are possible) and Google did this simultaneously at about 8:00 UTC+3 today. I’ve heard speculation that they couldn’t cave in before even if they wanted because then the other wouldn’t and the bad press would hit only the one who did. Now the coordination problem is apparently solved. I’m not expecting good things.
No, it does show a "not found" page for me on Google Play, as if it never existed. Not even the usual complete app listing with "not available in your country".
I guess, the important question is what happened to the app copies already installed on the phones? Do they still work? Can they still receive push notifications?
If they're still working - it's much less of an issue. The fact of pulling the app is still serious but surely everyone who wanted to participate had the app pre-installed for a while. If that's the case then Russian tsar's demands for pulling the app off the AppStore are just another example of your classical bureaucracy fuck-up.
