Pune Asked Google and Apple to Delete an App. The App Still Works.

October 16, 2026: the Pune RTO registers an FIR against Roppen Transportation Services - the company behind Rapido - for running bike taxis on petrol motorcycles registered as private vehicles, not commercial ones.

October 23: Pune district collector Jitendra Dudi, who also chairs the Regional Transport Authority, asks Police Commissioner Amitesh Kumar to have Rapido's bike-taxi booking option disabled across the district.

October 26: Kumar's office confirms it has written to the Google Play Store and Apple's App Store, asking them to remove the Rapido app entirely.

As of the most recent reporting, the bike-taxi option is still live on Rapido's app. Rides are still running.

Why none of this is actually new

Rapido has been through this exact cycle in Pune before. Bombay High Court rejected one of its earlier pleas to keep operating bike taxis here years ago. Maharashtra banned private, non-transport two-wheelers from app-based passenger service back in January 2023. What changed, briefly, was a July 2026 state announcement that app-based bike-taxi permits would actually start being issued from August 1 - a real regulatory door opening, for the first time. Rapido and Uber both applied to the Pune RTO for permission to run e-bike taxis. Neither has been confirmed as approved. Rapido resumed its bike-taxi service anyway in early October, and that's what triggered the FIR two weeks later.

Caught in the middle of all this are the state's own electrification terms: bike-taxi operators are required to go 100% electric by July 2027, which makes the current fight - over petrol bikes registered as someone's personal vehicle - a dispute about to become moot on its own timeline, if the industry survives to see it.

Auto-rickshaw and cab unions, meanwhile, aren't waiting for any of that to resolve. They've spent weeks pressing the collector's office to actually enforce the shutdown rather than just announce it, and have warned of their own protest if nothing visibly changes.

The one option that was never in legal limbo

Every side of this fight - Rapido, the RTO, the unions - is arguing about a service that, as of this week, still doesn't have a confirmed legal path in Pune. Carpooling never had that problem. Maharashtra's cabinet legalised app-based carpooling back in April 2025, more than a year before any of this bike-taxi back-and-forth started, with its own settled rules: a 14-trip weekly cap, a fare ceiling, mandatory insurance. If you need to get somewhere today and would rather not find out mid-ride whether the app you're using still works, that's the difference between a service still fighting for its paperwork and one that already cleared that fight a year ago.

Photo: Aaron C, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.