The Max messenger vanished from Russia’s App Store on the evening of June 3. The app disappeared from search results, and direct links to its page began returning an error. At the time of removal, Max ranked ninth among the most-downloaded apps; every other spot in the top ten was held by a VPN service. VK’s press service confirmed the app had become unavailable in the App Store and said the Russian developer had contacted Apple and was working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.
On the morning of June 4, Max’s press service said Apple devices had stopped receiving push notifications for calls and messages, though all other functions remained available. The company advised users to open the app periodically on their own so as “not to miss important messages.”
Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev was the first senior official to weigh in on Max’s removal. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, he said Apple had so far offered “no explanation” and noted that 25 to 30% of the messenger’s daily audience — “more than 60 million people” — uses iPhones and iPads. “That means Apple has simultaneously restricted access for more than 20 million users to the services of a national messenger,” he said, calling it “a worrying factor” that “global big tech companies are demonstrating their market power by imposing such restrictions.”
Apple has not commented on the removal of Max. The decision is the second of its kind in two months involving popular messengers in Russia suspected of spying on their users. The first, on April 9, was Telega — an alternative Telegram client in which experts found a range of vulnerabilities that put the privacy of users’ correspondence at risk.
Unlike Max, Telega’s removal from the App Store was preceded by clear warning signs: the hosting provider Cloudflare flagged two domains associated with the Telegram client — telega_me and api.telega_info — as spyware, and the certification authority and internet identity and security solutions provider GlobalSign then revoked the TLS certificate confirming the project’s authenticity and used for secure HTTPS connections.
In late April it appeared Max might follow the same path: Cloudflare flagged two of the service’s domains — max.ru and web.max.ru — as spyware. Within a day, however, the messenger was cleared and has not returned to the risk zone since.
Max has repeatedly been accused of spying on users. Experts found a spyware module in the app as early as the beginning of March, with the app apparently monitoring whether the device owner was using a VPN. Then, in mid-May, a technical analysis identified new vulnerabilities in the Android version of Max. The author of that study, a Habr user with the handle zarazaexe, noted that the tools embedded in the messenger would be sufficient to have it flagged as malware in the Google Play store as well. No such action on Android has materialized so far.
Several political organizations had been lobbying for Max’s removal from the App Store. Yulia Navalnaya announced a pressure campaign targeting Apple and Google as early as the beginning of February, calling on both companies to pull the messenger from their app stores. Supporters of Yekaterina Duntsova’s party Rassvet had put forward the same initiative somewhat earlier. Whether Apple acted in response to opposition pressure or on purely technical grounds will likely become clear once the company officially comments on Max’s removal from the App Store.
According to Apple’s transparency report, the company removed approximately 167,000 apps from its store over the course of 2025 — primarily due to suspected fraud and the removal of outdated services. More than 1,200 apps were removed during the same period at the request of Russian authorities.
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