Apple pulls Russian state-owned media outlets RT and Sputnik from global App Stores

After days of mounting pressure on tech companies to take further action against Russia in the wake of its invasion into Ukraine, Apple today confirmed it will remove the Kremlin-based media outlets Russia Today (RT News) and Sputnik News from the App Store in all markets outside Russia itself. The changes follow other actions taken against these two state-owned media operations.

In the last few days, Microsoft has removed both news sources from its search engine Bing and banned the Windows app store forRT. The government in Kyiv requested that the app be banned. RT was banned from the streaming platform. The media outlets were flagged with warnings and de-ranked. TikTok and Facebook were unavailable in the EU. They were also removed from YouTube.

The Ukrainian vice prime minister wrote a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook asking that Apple stop device sales in Russia and block access to the App Store.

The two Russian media apps had millions of lifetime downloads and were live in global markets as of yesterday.

According to Sensor Tower, Sputnik was ranked 85 in the News category in the U.S. App Store. In the last seven days, worldwide installs of RT News for iOS were up 241%. The firm noted that Sputnik installs were up 163% for the same period.

The Russian apps footprints were reported by the two app store intelligence firms.

According to Sensor Tower, 1.7 million of the 5.7 million installs of RT News were on the App Store. Sputnik had 2 million installs worldwide since it was released in March 2015, and around 470,000 of them were on Apple's mobile device operating system.

The apps had a wider reach, according to the data from Apptopia. 2.5 million of the 10 million installs were on the iPad. Sputnik News had 3.85 million downloads, 960,000 of which were on the iPad.

Neither firm has an exact number because they don't work off direct access to App Store data, only Apple and the apps know the true install figures. Both estimate using statistical models.

The news sites were not the only ones affected by the war. Following a similar move by Google, Apple disabled both traffic and live incidents in Apple Maps in Ukranian as a precautionary measure.