On October 3, 2026, Jack Dorsey made public Apple's notice that India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had used Section 69A of the Information Technology Act to block Bitchat, a Bluetooth-mesh messaging app that needs no internet connection. The app was pulled from Google Play and the Apple App Store, and its website appears inaccessible in India. Apple's notice said only that the app "includes content that is illegal in India." Earlier notices from July objected that such apps "work even during internet shutdowns and hamper lawful interception, attribution and traceability."
The strongest case for the government
The state's concern is not frivolous. Investigators rely on logs, phone-number registration and intermediary cooperation to trace conspiracies, and a mesh app has none of these. Authorities also worry that shutdowns, which India uses to contain unrest, become toothless if citizens can switch to a network the state cannot switch off. In July the government said Bitchat could facilitate "riots, organized crime, terrorism, misinformation campaigns, and other criminal activity," according to CyberInsider's report of the GitHub notice. A regulator that loses visibility over a whole class of communication has a real operational problem.
But a real problem does not give the state a lawful power to solve it this way.
What Section 69A actually permits
Section 69A lets the Central Government direct blocking when it is satisfied that this is necessary in the interest of the "sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order," or to prevent incitement to a cognizable offence connected with those grounds. The orders must be made "for reasons to be recorded in writing," as the statutory text states.
The listed grounds concern what content or conduct does. None of them is that a tool lacks surveillance hooks. The reasons attributed to the government for Bitchat, namely that it works during shutdowns and lacks traceability, describe an architecture. They do not describe a specific unlawful act. As Nikhil Pahwa notes in MediaNama, citing his earlier Economic Times column, no Indian law requires a messaging app to collect registration data or build in a central log, so the absence of those features cannot itself be a basis for a ban.
The procedural problem
The Supreme Court's decision in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (March 24, 2015) is the anchor here. It struck down Section 66A, and its treatment of Section 69A rests on the requirement that blocking be tied to recorded reasons and the procedural safeguards of the 2009 Blocking Rules. Those safeguards only mean something if the affected party can learn why it was blocked and respond. An Apple notice saying an app "includes content that is illegal in India" tells neither the developers nor the public which content, under which ground.
The record also shows an unsteady legal footing. The July order against GitHub invoked Section 79(3)(b) and Rule 3(1)(d), the intermediary-liability route, and demanded that three repositories be disabled within three hours. The Internet Freedom Foundation called that "unconstitutional and authoritarian," arguing the government was using Section 79(3)(b) as a blocking mechanism in place of the Section 69A process, according to CyberInsider. MediaNama reports the Section 79 route was later withdrawn and replaced by Section 69A. Moving to the statute that carries safeguards is better than the earlier route, but it does not cure a ground the statute does not contain. MediaNama's author says he has not seen the October order, and the confidentiality provisions of the Blocking Rules mean the public may never see it.
Why this matters beyond one app
Bitchat's code is open source, so blocking storefronts and a website does not remove it, and sideloading remains possible. The practical effect falls on the ordinary user, who loses a supported distribution channel. It falls hardest on people in precisely the situations where connectivity is cut. The block does little against determined bad actors while removing a resilience tool for everyone else.
MediaNama also draws out a second lesson: Apple and Google comply with such orders as readily as any Indian company, which shows how concentrated app distribution has become a point of control over speech. A policy that treats every tool the state cannot observe as presumptively illegal would reach VPNs, end-to-end encrypted chat, peer-to-peer file sharing and any future offline protocol.
A proportionate alternative
India has narrower tools. Where a specific group is using any app to plan violence, agencies can pursue the individuals under existing criminal law, seek device-level evidence under lawful process, and issue reasoned, content-specific Section 69A orders that can be reviewed. Where policymakers think shutdown-proof communication is a genuine national-security gap, the honest route is Parliament, which can debate and legislate traceability or registration duties and be accountable for the trade-offs. Doing so by blocking order inverts the process: the executive decides a capability is unacceptable, then finds a statute to fit.
Shutdowns are themselves the larger issue. Treating a tool that works around a shutdown as the offence puts the blame on citizens for the state's own decision to cut connectivity. A government confident in the necessity and proportionality of its shutdowns should be willing to defend them in court, rather than blocking the workaround.
What to watch
A challenge is likely, and the questions are clear. Were written reasons actually recorded, and under which of the statutory grounds? Was the developer heard? And can an architectural feature, absent any specific unlawful content, ever satisfy Section 69A? If the courts say no, the block should fall. If the government prevails, the lesson for every developer building privacy-preserving or offline software for India is that being unobservable may be enough to be banned.