Apple has eliminated Quran Majeed, a preferred app for studying and listening to the Quran, from the App Store in China, the BBC reports. The firm reportedly eliminated the app on the request of presidency officers, a considerably shocking transfer given Islam is a protected faith within the People’s Republic of China.

Quran Majeed is out there without cost and “recognized by 25 million Muslim users around the world” according to the app’s developer Pakistan Data Management Services. The app’s removing apparently had nothing to do with its spiritual content material, “according to Apple, our app Quran Majeed has been removed from the China App Store because it includes content that is illegal,” the developer informed the BBC. The developer says it’s now trying to resolve the problem with China’s Cyberspace Administration. The Verge has reached out to each Apple and China’s US Embassy for remark.

Without clearer clarification, the transfer looks as if a attainable overreach, although it does fall inside Apple’s official stance on human rights abroad (PDF):

We’re required to adjust to native legal guidelines, and at occasions there are complicated points about which we could disagree with governments and different stakeholders on the correct path ahead. With dialogue, and a perception within the energy of engagement, we attempt to discover the answer that greatest serves our customers—their privateness, their potential to precise themselves, and their entry to dependable info and useful expertise.

While it’s logical for enterprise, that framing has positioned the corporate in questionable positions earlier than. Apple has removed VPN apps that allowed Chinese customers to keep away from censorship and proactively filtered out apps that talked about Tiananmen Square, the Dalai Lama, or Taiwanese and Tibetan independence. Apple’s suppliers within the area have additionally been related to the oppression of China’s predominantly Muslim Uyghur minority.

Apple is in a tough scenario both method. It depends on the enterprise relationships and gross sales it makes in China. Taking a robust stance towards the federal government may put that in jeopardy. Just this week, Microsoft made the choice to close down the native Chinese model of LinkedIn, acknowledging individually that it’s turning into more and more tough to adjust to the Chinese authorities’s calls for. Apple hasn’t but discovered that line for itself, and with how a lot it depends on China to make its iPhone enterprise work, it won’t occur anytime quickly.