AFI 2025: METHODOLODGY

Executive Summary

Framework Highlights

1. Quantitative Metrics

• App Score: Measures availability of 1,000 curated apps across ten sensitive categories (e.g., VPNs, social media, privacy tools). App availability is tested on both Apple and Google platforms, with scores averaged to calculate a unified score for each region.
• Availability Score: Captures the overall openness of app ecosystems based on the unavailability rates reported by AppleCensorship and GoogleCensorship.
• Government Takedown Penalty: Transparency data from Apple and Google is used to calculate penalties based on the number of government takedown requests, with higher penalties for regions with frequent intervention.

2. Quantitative Metrics Five themes assess the broader legal, political, and infrastructural context of app freedom:

• Government Censorship Policy: Examines direct app bans, restrictions on privacy tools, and surveillance practices.
• Legal Framework: Evaluates the clarity and transparency of app-related laws and users’ ability to challenge app bans.
• Economic Context: Analyzes market monopolization, trade barriers, and developer compliance costs.
• Sociocultural Context: Considers public support for censorship, targeting of marginalized groups, and restrictions on cultural content.
• Technological Infrastructure: Assesses government control over internet infrastructure and the frequency of internet shutdowns affecting app access.

Scoring and Ranking Process

1. Final Quantitative Score:

• Combines App and Availability Scores, adjusted for government takedown penalties.
• Weighted: 70% App Score, 30% Availability Score.

2. Final Combined Score:

• Merges the Final Quantitative Score (60% weight) and the Qualitative Score (40% weight) for a comprehensive ranking.

3. Tier Assignments:

• Countries are grouped into four tiers based on their final score: High Freedom, Moderately High Freedom, Moderate Freedom, and Low Freedom.

Innovations and Future Directions

The 2025 methodology builds on prior frameworks by:

• Expanding qualitative analysis to capture regional nuances.
• Incorporating data from automated tools (Greatfire.org) and platform transparency reports.Exploring adaptive weighting for single-platform apps and regional market share variations.
• Proposing normalization techniques to enhance cross-country comparability.

Purpose and Impact

The App Freedom Index is a critical tool for understanding and advocating for digital rights. It highlights how government policies, platform governance, and infrastructural factors influence app freedom worldwide. By blending data-driven insights with contextual analysis, the 2025 methodology offers a more holistic view of the mobile app ecosystem, empowering stakeholders to address digital censorship and promote openness globally

App Freedom Index (AFI): Methodology 2025

Introduction

This revised 2025 methodology builds upon our previous frameworks, integrating insights from both AppleCensorship.com and GoogleCensorship.org to measure app freedom across 175 countries and territories. It combines a curated App Score, a broad Availability Score, and a Qualitative Score, and then applies a government takedown penalty as needed. By doing so, this methodology aims to present a balanced, comprehensive view of the app ecosystem’s openness and the various factors shaping it.

Defining App Freedom,

App Freedom is defined as the ability of users to access, download, and use applications from app stores available in a given region without undue restrictions, moderation, or censorship from governments, platforms, or any other intermediaries.

This index is designed to move beyond a narrow focus on censorship and app removals, offering a more holistic understanding of digital freedoms. Rather than concentrating exclusively on specific cases of censorship, it evaluates how accessible a broad spectrum of apps can be— especially those that uphold fundamental rights such as freedom of expression, privacy, and access to information. In doing so, the App Freedom Index provides a more nuanced picture of the mobile app environment, reflecting the true depth and breadth of users’ digital freedoms.

The index also aims to highlight how government interventions, platform governance decisions, and other factors influence users’ digital freedoms. By incorporating data not only on specific sets of ‘sensitive’ or otherwise significant app categories, but also on the broader app availability landscape and government takedown requests, the AFI provides a comprehensive picture of app freedom worldwide

Scope and Objectives

Ranking countries, regions, or territories with a unified App Freedom Index allows for the measurement and comparison of how free or restricted the app ecosystem is across different areas. As app distribution platforms often face similar censorship policies and directives, a unified index provides a comprehensive view of app censorship within each country or territory. This unified approach helps capture the combined effect of restrictions, censorship, and the influence of national regulatory environments and political pressures on both Google and Apple app stores.

Having separate indexes for the two app stores in a given country could help in assessing how censorship impacts them differently, as the degree of compliance with local censorship policies can vary between stores. However, this approach risks offering a fragmented view of app censorship trends and may complicate the generalization of trends at a national level.

To understand large-scale and complex censorship trends, a unified indexing system is more logical. It also facilitates cross-country and cross-platform comparisons and projections of the global app freedom landscape, which can be valuable for advocacy and policy making. These rankings, however, can be supplemented with store-specific analyses to provide secondary insights into the differential enforcement of censorship across the two stores.

With this understanding, the primary objective of developing an App Freedom Index is to assess and rank countries, regions, or territories based on the level of freedom users enjoy when accessing applications. It aims to explore how governmental and platform policies affect app availability across 175 countries and territories.

The App Freedom Index adopts a mixed approach, combining both quantitative data (on actual app availability and reported restrictions) and qualitative assessments (policy reviews, transparency reports, expert opinions, and compliance standards) to calculate scores for each country.

Data Sources

The AFI uses three key elements:

1. Quantitative Measures:

• App Score (Curated Apps): Derived from a set of 1,000 carefully selected apps spanning ten sensitive or thematically significant categories.
• Availability Score (Broad Measure): Based on unavailability rates reported by AppleCensorship.com and GoogleCensorship.org, providing a complementary, high-level perspective on each region’s overall app environment.

Greatfire.org’s ASM and PSM

To develop the index, data insights from Greatfire.org’s App Store Monitor (ASM) and Play Store Monitor (PSM) are utilized. These automated web crawlers continuously track app availability across app stores in different regions.

Given the sheer volume of apps—millions across hundreds of app stores—it is impossible to monitor and evaluate all apps simultaneously. To address this challenge, the methodology focuses on a curated set of 1,000 globally available apps, selected based on predetermined categories.

2. Qualitative Measures:

Drawing on policy reviews, expert opinions, and other qualitative assessments to capture nuances not reflected in numerical data.

3. Government Takedown Penalty (Transparency Reports):

Using data from Apple’s and Google’s transparency reports on government-requested app removals, a penalty is applied after the initial score calculation to reflect the degree of state intervention

I.

Quantitative Method

A. Curated App Score:

Categories, Apps and Justification for Their Selection

The ten categories selected for this index aim to provide a comprehensive view of app censorship across a diverse array of “sensitive” areas, typically subject to regulatory control or censorship. Each category includes apps that fulfill various social, political, and personal functions and are often targeted by restrictive policies due to their potential impact on public opinion, cultural norms, and political dynamics. These categories reflect restrictions on tools that promote civic engagement, personal expression, and access to information.

Explanation of Each Category

App curation

1,000 apps are chosen, evenly distributed across the two platforms and the ten categories

Data Collection and Scoring:

• For each region, the availability of each of the 1,000 apps is tested on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store
• If an app is available in a region’s Apple App Store, it receives 1 point; if unavailable, 0 points. The same logic applies to the Google Play Store.
• The app’s score for that region is the average of the two results.
  Apple Store Availability: 1 if available, 0 if not.
  Google Play Store Availability: 1 if available, 0 if not.
  Unified App Score = (Apple Score + Google Score) / 2.
• For example:
  Apple: Available (1 point)
  Google: Unavailable (0 points)
  Unified App Score = (1 + 0) / 2 = 0.5

Category and Overall App Score:

• Sum the unified scores of the 100 apps in each category and convert to a percentage. For example, if 85 apps are available on average, the category score is 85%.
• Average the ten category scores to obtain the Overall App Score (0–100 scale).

B. Availability Score (Broad Measure)

In addition to the curated apps, the AFI considers overall app ecosystem openness through each store’s “unavailability rate.” This metric, provided by AppleCensorship.com and GoogleCensorship.org, reflects the percentage of tested apps that are unavailable in that region.

Calculation:

1. Obtain the Unavailability Rate from AppleCensorship.com for the Apple App Store.

2. Obtain the Unavailability Rate from GoogleCensorship.org for the Google Play Store.

3. Convert each unavailability rate into an Availability Score by subtracting it from 100.

   For example, if the Apple Unavailability Rate is 20%, Apple Availability Score = 100 – 20 = 80. If the Google Unavailability Rate is 15%, Google Availability Score = 100 – 15 = 85.

4. Take the average of the Apple and Google Availability Scores to get a combined Availability Score.

   Combined Availability Score = (80 + 85) / 2 = 82.5

C. Combining the App Score and Availability Score

A region’s Preliminary Quantitative Score is derived by combining the App Score and the Availability Score.

Preliminary Quantitative Score = (0.7 × App Score) + (0.3 × Availability Score)

For example, if a region’s App Score is 90 and Availability Score is 82.5: Preliminary Quantitative Score = (0.7 × 90) + (0.3 × 82.5) = 63 + 24.75 = 87.75

*Note: We are preserving the 2024 methodology’s internal weighting of 70% App Score and 30% Availability Score for the quantitative component to remain consistent with the earlier approach.

D. Government Takedown Penalty (Transparency Reports)

Calculation of Annualized Requests:

1. Aggregate the total number of government takedown requests complied with by Apple and by Google over a defined multi-year period (e.g., the last 5.5 years).
2. Compute an annualized average for each platform by dividing the total number of takedowns by the number of years in the period.
3. Combine the two annualized averages by summing them and dividing by 2 to get an overall annualized takedown figure for that region.

Penalty Application:

• If a region has no takedown: Penalty = 0.
• For 1 to 10 takedowns/year: Penalty ranges from 0 to 2 points, increasing linearly.
• For 11 to 50 takedowns/year: Penalty ranges from 2 to 10 points, increasing linearly with the number of requests.
• For more than 50 requests/year: Maximum penalty = 10 points.

Example:

• Apple removed an average of 5 apps/year.
• Google removed an average of 15 apps/year.
• Combined average = (5 + 15) / 2 = 10 takedowns/year.
  At 10 takedown/year, the penalty = 2 points.

E. Final Quantitative Score

Apply the Penalty:

Final Quantitative Score (before penalty) – Penalty = Final Quantitative Score (after penalty)

Using the previous example: Final Quantitative Score = 87.75 (Preliminary Quantitative Score) – 2 (Penalty) = 85.75

After applying the Government Takedown Penalty, the Final Quantitative Score is obtained and is ready to be integrated with the Qualitative Score.

II.

Qualitative Method

Overview:

The qualitative methodology to assess app restrictive environments involves gathering detailed and nuanced insights, so as to explore the subjective and contextual elements of control, regulation and censorship practices in each country, which are not captured by quantitative data.

1. Government Censorship Policy
2. Legal Framework
3. Economic Context
4. Sociocultural Context
5. Technological Infrastructure

Themes and Weights: Each theme is weighted, and questions within each theme are scored on a 0–8 scale, where 0 indicates poor performance (high censorship) and higher scores indicate fewer restrictions. Weights are assigned to questions as well, to reflect their relative importance in determining app freedom.

1. Government Censorship Policy (24 points)
2. Legal Framework (36 points)
3. Economic Context (15 points)
4. Sociocultural Context (15 points)
5. Technological Infrastructure (10 points)

Scoring Procedure:

• Each theme includes several questions. Scores (0–8) for each question are summed and scaled according to the theme’s weight.
• The weighted scores from all five themes are summed to produce a raw Qualitative Score out of 100.
• A higher Qualitative Score indicates fewer legal, economic, sociocultural, and infrastructural barriers, as well as less direct government intervention

III.

Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Scores

The final index seeks to balance tangible, data-driven measures with contextual, qualitative insights:

Final Combined Score = (0.6 × Final Quantitative Score) + (0.4 × Qualitative Score)

For example, if Final Quantitative Score = 85.75 and Qualitative Score = 75:
Final Combined Score = (0.6 × 85.75) + (0.4 × 75)
= 51.45 + 30
= 81.45

IV.

Ranking Countries and Assigning Tiers

After calculating the Final Combined Score for all regions, they are ranked from highest to lowest. In the event of ties, the tie-breaking rules follow the 2024 methodology:

1. Higher App Score takes precedence.
2. Fewer government takedowns (i.e., lower penalty) is then considered.
3. If still tied, alphabetical order is used.

Tier Assignments (Four Tiers):

Tier 1 (High Freedom): Final Combined Score ≥ 98
Tier 2 (Moderately High Freedom): 94–97.99
Tier 3 (Moderate Freedom): 90–93.99
Tier 4 (Low Freedom): < 90

This four-tier system reflects the distribution of scores observed in practice, offering finer distinctions at the upper end of the scale.