Apple censors Dalai Lama iPhone apps in China

Kadeer, an exiled leader of China's Uighur minority group, gets similar treatment by Chinese officials and state media. An iPhone app named 10 Conditions, based on a documentary about her life, also did not appear in test searches of the App Store in China.

Apple lets developers choose in which countries' versions of the App Store to sell their products, but it is unlikely that the Kadeer and Dalai Lama apps are unavailable in China by the choice of their makers. The app about Kadeer was submitted to the App Stores in all countries, James Boldiston, the app's developer, said in an e-mail. Other developers said they could not recall if they had excluded China, but most had other apps for sale in the China store, showing that in other cases they had included the country.

"Given that Apple has cooperated with China before (by not distributing games), it’s of course very likely that it’s Apple, not the developers, that are preventing certain apps from appearing,” said one China-based app developer, who asked not to be named, in an e-mail. Games were not sold in the China App Store before recent months.

Boldiston and other developers of the missing items said Apple had not told them their apps were unavailable in China.

"I didn't know the app had been pulled, and wasn't informed," said James Sugrue, who designed the Dalai Quotes app. "Apple reserve[s] the right to do this sort of thing, and while from a censorship point of view I disagree with this, I can understand why they did," he said.