- Samsung and Xiaomi have eliminated the Adguard VPN application of their official application stores in Russia at the request of the Government
- Apple already killed Adguard VPN in 2024, along with At least 60 VPN applications
- No more than 100 VPN is available at the Apple App Store, with 50 not available on Google Play Store
UPDATE: Adguard confirmed to Techradar that Xiaomi also eliminated its VPN application of its Russian app store in the Roskomnadzor application on May 16, 2025, after publication. We edit the article to reflect this.
Another VPN service has disappeared from official application stores in Russia.
This time, Samsung has eliminated the Adguard VPN application from its galaxy app store in the country to the Roskomnadzor demand.
A day later, on May 16, 2025, the Technological Giant Xiaomi also did the same, killing the VPN application of the supplier of his Russian App Store after receiving an order of elimination of the country’s censure agency.
This comes as part of Kremlin’s actions against VPNs that have seen more than 100 applications of the Apple Russian application store disappear, including some of the best VPN services in the market.
Although Google apparently resisted most of these demands so far, recent data shows that at least 53 VPN are also not available at the Google Play store in Russia. Adguard VPN, however, has not yet been affected.
“Unfortunate development”
“Our application has been eliminated from the Samsung store in Russia, an unfortunate development, in our opinion”, “,”, “in our opinion,” Adguard CPO, Denis Vyazovoy, told Techradar.
The VPN service has received a synthetic email from Samsung (see the image below) to inform that its “application information has been modified.”
Change? “Russia was excluded from the lists of sales countries according to the application of the Russian government. This application is prohibited by the Russian government,” says Email.
Xiaomi has sent a communication similar to the supplier (see the image below), noting that “the distribution of VPN applications in Russia is not allowed. Therefore, we have to eliminate its application of Russia.”
Adguard VPN was already among the services of the Virtual Private Network (VPN) affected by the Great Purge of the Apple App Store of Russia last year. Applications not available also include some of Techradar’s favorites, such as Nordvpn, Expressvpn and Proton VPN, but also the popular Russian Service Amnezia VPN.
However, the supplier confirmed to Techradar that its application is still available at the Google Play store in Russia at the time of writing.
It is also worth noting that these removals only affect Russia -based users. The Adguard VPN application is still available in all official application stores outside Russia.
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“We see this as part of a broader tendency to restrict access to tools that help people protect their privacy and maintain access to an open internet,” Vyazovoy told Techradar.
Kremlin’s actions against VPNs have intensified since a law imposed in March 2024 penalized information on ways to avoid Internet restrictions. This is probably the legal basis on which the Russian censure agency is issuing these demands to large technology companies.
However, experts have long asked these companies that maintain the human rights of Russian citizens by refraining from cooperating with these demands and restoring censored VPN applications.
Vyazovoy confirmed to Techradar that the service continues to operate through other channels and that the supplier actively seeks ways to remain accessible to all users.
If you are using a Galaxy or Xiaomi smartphone, I recommend downloading the Adguard VPN application of Google Play Store, where the service is still available at the time of writing.
The supplier also suggests downloading it directly from its official website to make sure to obtain the most recent and safe version.
