(Beijing – August 8, 2024) The Cyberspace Administration of China recently removed the most popular Catholic app from the Apple App Store in July.

The Catholic app Hallow is a prayer app that offers audio-based Catholic devotional content. It is the first religious app to top the Apple App Store charts.

Since its launch in 2018, this American Catholic app has been downloaded over 14 million times and is widely used “in more than 150 countries/regions.” It is a very popular and well-received Catholic meditation and prayer app.

The app’s founder, Alex Jones, posted on social media last month (July 15) stating that the popular American Catholic app “Hallow” had just been kicked out of the Apple App Store in China.

He added, “Praying for all the Christians in China.”

The next day, on July 16, Jones told the Catholic News Agency (CNA) in an email that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) informed him that the “Hallow” app “deemed to include content on the app that is illegal in China and so must be removed,” but did not provide further details.

Jones stated that the number of users of the Catholic app in China is “in the thousands,” although they do not have exact figures.

“We will continue to try and serve our brothers and sisters in Christ in China as best we can through our website, web application, social media content, but mostly with our prayers,” He said.

Before being removed in China, Hallow had launched a new audio series about the life of St. John Paul II, which included discussions on his resistance to communism.

However, the founder of Hallow stated he did not want to speculate whether the sudden removal was related to this.

The Chinese government has long imposed strict control and surveillance over the internet and social media platforms within the country. The “Measures for the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services,” which came into effect in March 2022, further forced religious believers to comply with the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, using Chinese internet laws to pressure the removal of religious apps.