This is the working behind our reading of Apple's support directory at apple.com/heretohelp. It is here so that nobody has to take our word for any of it. The source is public and the whole count can be repeated in an afternoon.
Download the counts as a CSV, one row per country.
Apple publishes a page per country. The list of them is embedded in each page as JSON, so we read that list and then fetched every page: 181 countries, 1,206 organisations. Nine countries publish a page per language, so there are more pages than countries.
We got this wrong the first time, and the correction is the most important thing on this page.
Our first pass searched each entry for words like LGBT, trans and queer. That finds the organisations that say what they are, and misses the ones that cannot. Nigeria's page lists The Initiative for Equal Rights, that country's best known LGBTQ+ organisation, described only as serving "marginalised individuals" and giving legal aid over "human rights violations". Tonga's lists the Tonga Leitis Association, and leiti is the Tongan word for a trans woman.
So we read every organisation in the affected countries again, asking what each one does rather than which words it uses. Two had been wrongly counted as absent. Five more we could not settle either way, and those are left out of the count rather than guessed at, which means the number of countries with nothing could be lower than the figure above.
The bias in the first method ran in one direction, and it is worth naming: an organisation in a country that criminalises being LGBTQ+ is the one most likely to be described in careful, non-specific language. A count of absence done by keyword therefore overstates that absence precisely where the stakes are highest.
Every link is opened. We record three outcomes and keep them apart: working, dead (the address returns a 404 or 410, or the domain has no DNS record at all, checked against two independent public resolvers), and blocked, which means it answered but not to us: a 403, a timeout, a redirect loop. Plenty of live sites refuse an automated request, so blocked links are not counted as dead and are not published on our own directory either.
We publish the counts, not the organisation-level file. Our own directory declines to name local organisations in countries where being LGBTQ+ is criminalised, because naming them can expose both the organisation and the people who contact it, and a downloadable file labelling those same organisations would undo that in one click.
Journalists checking the finding can rebuild the detail from the public source, and we will talk through method with anyone who asks.
The directory was first read in full on 10 August 2026 and has been re-read since. Links were last checked on 14 October 2026. The figures on this page and in the CSV are read from our database when you load them, so they are current rather than a snapshot of what we once found.