Did banning it cause it to get adopted even faster in India than it otherwise would have? That seems like the salient point to me.

I dont have data for any country, but if anything banning it from github gave it visibility (I personally learnt of it because of that). I don't think that banning it from github hurts its distribution really because I do not expect github to be the channel it gets popularised through as opposed to social media, in which case where the source code is hosted does not really matter. If it gets banned from the app stores, though, it will be a different issue that will definitely hurt.

We both know systems are more complex than # of downloads. In this case, the ban was a sign of weakness the establishment of the government and Github and definitely their control was weakened, which is the opposite of their goal of maintaining control, so it did not have the desired effect.

Likely faster than it would've otherwise but not likely as fast as it needs to to succeed. Similar to when Twitter got bought out and then Musk banned people who linked their Mastodon. It certainly helped Mastodon in the short term but likely hurt it in the long term

People can be surprisingly resourceful when they feel like they have a need to do so.

In tech circles, we talk a lot about friction and user experience, and those matter enormously, but they're not the be-all-end-all. We have OSS developers underestimating friction on one hand, and tech companies overestimating it on the other.

Even if something requires you to be tech-savvy to set up, people will still do it if the need is dire enough, because everybody "knows a guy". Console modchips in the 2000s are my go-to example. They were devilishly complex to set up, often requiring proficiency with a soldering iron, with stakes for failure being very high (breaking the console you just spend all your savings buying), yet everybody and their mom had one. All you needed was a friend with such a chip, who could tell you who the "guy" in your town is.

I never even heard of the app until I saw the news it was getting banned, so I installed it out of curiosity - and I'm keeping it installed because I like the idea of it. I presume I'm not alone in this. They're basically giving it free publicity by attempting to ban it.

As soon as installation of software outside Play Store is made impossible, any such discussion is moot already anyway.

It pushed it to a place with no search-ability and significantly less users. It worked to effectively suppress the project. I say that as someone who uses Radicle and likes the project (I am hoping node search comes soon).

Are those things that have happened?

I mean, here's the first 4 URLs that show up when I Google for bitchat:

  https://bitchat.free/
  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bitchat.droid&hl=en_US
  https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
  https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bitchat-mesh/id6748219622

All of those work for me where I am, so AFAICT: It hasn't been pushed from one place to another at all. It's still where it was.

It has additionally been copied over to Radicle... and that's OK, isn't it?