many people in the comments say that they’d keep using the banned apps, which is a fair thing to say since we said that they’re banned not blocked.
however, i would a assume that banned encryption eventually means blocked encryption. as is the case in russia where matrix and simpleX are blocked too https://merlinux.eu/press/2025-05-14-russia-deltachat.pdf
now, blocked servers can be accessed via vpn as many people pointed out, but a government that really wants to crack down on encryption would use deep packet inspection like the uae. this allows detection and blocking of vpns too, as long as they’re well known enough, just like with the encrypted chat servers. so, vanilla wireguard may be blocked, but the latest obfuscated wireguard mod may not.
with all that in mind, encrypted communication would probably be a constant cat and mouse game, unless everyone built their own very tiny encrypted communication. if the variety was large enough, it would probably be too resource intensive to block it all, but it would also be very resource intensive for everyone trying communicate. also, not everyone is a programmer, capable of creating their own encrypted messaging.
i’d be really curious what people would do unter the described, very restricted circumstances that partially exist in some places of the world. i don’t really have an answer yet.