TL;DR: they stopped selling hardware in Russia, but people still find a way to import it.
It also looks like they are still maintaining Russia’s region in the AppStore.
I can understand smuggled hardware, but it’s not like Russians can buy their localized App Store in India… it would be much more helpful if they weren’t running it there, as the smuggled iPhones would be just bricks
Thing is, if they kill the App Store entirely, they also fuck over Russians that already have iPhones and are fleeing the country, and or dissenting the government.
Looks like they’re trying to leave as much of the App Store as available as possible. That said, at some point the government censorship will become so bad that they might need to pull the plug entirely.
And that said, if they allowed proper side loading, this wouldn’t be an issue. They could just peace out entirely.
