(Based on reading just one article, I've never seen or used the app) Seems like all the app did was serve as list of candidates, 225 electoral districts long, and a map from street address to electoral district.
Surely this can be trivially implemented as a website, in a matter of hours, no? It looks like the mistake Navalny's team made was trusting one method of distribution of information. Even worse, trusting a method with a central and corporate choke point.
That aside, I'm disgusted, but not surprised, at Google's actions.
It is implemented as website, but blocked by regular DPI censorship mechanisms deployed in Russia.
They started a blocking campaign against popular VPN providers as well before elections, making it harder for older and less tech-savvy people to access information from the opposition.
I guess that apps have implemented some routing and device caching mechanisms to ensure more user-friendly approach for "regular" people who don't want to spend too much time figuring out how to avoid censorship.
Their websites were blocked long before the regime started to name FBK as extrimists and they switched to apps particularly because apps is harder to block. They probably just didn't expect google&apple to become so much accommodating so quickly.
One of the reasons why they did what they did is because the regime said they would take the local staff as hostages if they'll fail to comply (aka "the staff is responsible for the law breaches made by the company").
Surely this can be trivially implemented as a website, in a matter of hours, no? It looks like the mistake Navalny's team made was trusting one method of distribution of information. Even worse, trusting a method with a central and corporate choke point.
That aside, I'm disgusted, but not surprised, at Google's actions.