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Ask HN: Why has iOS never had a control for restricting an app's network access?
iPhoneOS/iOS/iPadOS has typically been good at providing privacy controls to the user, allowing them to choose whether to give an app access to their contacts, media, location, etc. They've also iterated on this over the years — moving from allowing you to only share all of your media or none of your media to allowing you to select which media can be accessed by an app. Similarly for location, instead of either sharing your precise location or not, you can now choose whether to give an app precise location, or a more general location.
However — I've thought on and off for years — I feel like an omission is a toggle to restrict an app's network access. I would be much more willing to give an app other permissions if I knew my data couldn't be uploaded somewhere. But in its current state, I almost never give an app permission to access (for example) my contacts because I assume that data will be uploaded and stored.
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If I remember correctly, custom keyboard extensions don't have access to the network by default, unless you explicitly give them that permission. Why hasn't this been extended to all apps?
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This also brings up another question — why has iOS never had fine-grained control over which contacts you share with an app? (Similar to how they updated the photos/media permissions in the last few years.)
- xg15 5y agoIt'd like to broaden this question: Why is there almost nowhere a straight-forward option to limit network access? Even backend app containers like Docker, which are all about restricting permissions and maintaining a sandbox, allow arbitrary outgoing connections by default.
- ermir 5y agoIt's because if you only allow an app to access an approved and whitelisted API endpoint, that endpoint can trivially implement a proxy and essentially act as a gateway to the open internet.
- frankjr 5y ago> Why has iOS never had a control for restricting an app's network access? The funny thing is iOS (and I assume all of the other forks) does have this implemented but it's just not widely available. If you buy an iPhone in China, you can restrict individual apps from using both cellular & Wi-Fi. In other countries (I assume), you only have the option to disable cellular (Settings -> Mobile Data). https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/aib10i/in_china_ios_allows_you_to_turn_off_mobile_data https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/aib10i/in_china_ios_al... https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/278051/ios-wi-fi-is-turned-off-for-some-application-and-cannot-turn-on https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/278051/ios-wi-fi-i...
- _aavaa_ 5y agoIf I were to guess: advertising. It would essentially kill the business model of any offline app with relies on advertising to function as soon as regular people learn that turning off network access means they keep their app and also don't get advertising.
- Tagbert 5y agoAdvertising is not something that Apple puts much value on. They themselves don’t sell advertising other than a few keyword placement slots in the App Store search results. Apple has given users the option to restrict the ability of third-parties from doing tracking for advertising.
- _aavaa_ 5y agoA) They provided the ability for users to restrict third-parties from tracking user, tracking that was made possible by Apple’s own code. B) Just because apple doesn’t put value on it, since they don’t sell any outside of app search, doesn’t mean that app developers don’t.
- webmobdev 5y agoTwo reasons: 1. An application firewall would prevent Apple from collecting data from its customers. (An obvious exception for Apple's app would result in negative publicity for it). 2. Apple also has an online advertising network, and in the early days Apple's plan was to entice developers to use their ad platform on various apps. This would mean Apple could make money from "free" apps too (developers who charged for their apps were already paying the "Apple Tax"). An application firewall preventing network access would make such an ad service useless on their platform.
- olliej 5y agoExcept apple doesn’t monetize user traffic. Unlike google, apple’s business model isn’t based on selling out their users. Moreover there are already firewall products on the App Store that do enforce exactly the limits you’re talking about.
- Tagbert 5y agoThe only advertising that Apple does is keyword results in the App Store. A long time ago Apple tried an advertising network but they dropped that within a couple of years of launching it.
- tinus_hn 5y agoBecause then ad supported apps wouldn’t work. And it doesn’t work for privacy of course because an app can just launch the browser with a URL that encodes that private information.
- u2077 5y agoI’ve been using https://lockdownprivacy.com/ https://lockdownprivacy.com/ along with Apple’s app privacy report to block domains. Works great.
- egberts1 5y agothat Lockdown App is not a true firewall app. Lockdown app requires a VPN setting (of which I refuse to grant).
- 1over137 5y agoOn macOS, there is Little Snitch. Would be great to have it on iOS.