Bitchat posed law-and-order risk: Centre

New Delhi: Amid the removal of Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat from app stores in India following the IT Ministry’s order, government sources on Tuesday said the Bluetooth messaging app was a law-and-order concern and had to be removed.

The government is duty-bound to maintain law and order, sources asserted. Bitchat, they said, allowed anyone to turn on Bluetooth and send messages through several hops, and that this was a law-and-order concern.

Apple has officially removed the offline messaging application, Bitchat, from its India App Store after a demand from the country’s IT ministry, Jack Dorsey said in an X post on Saturday.

“Government of India officially removes Bitchat from the App Store,” Dorsey, who is the app’s developer and Twitter co-founder, wrote in his post, alongside a screenshot of a notice from Apple’s App Review team. The app has also been pulled down from the Play Store.