Outside of China, apps that provide ordinary VPN service rather than content filtering seem to be safe. Apple has also removed a number of apps from its Chinese app store, including illegal gambling apps and VPN apps that are used to circumvent China’s internet restrictions. More recently, the store pulled an app from Infowars, the controversial right-wing media platform led by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. In a 2013 paper, Luis Hestres, now an assistant professor of communication at the University of Texas at San Antonio, pointed to examples of apps being pulled from the App Store amid external pressure, from ones with politically controversial content to an app that enabled users to create mock driver’s licenses. That’s a design decision often praised by security experts, citing the lack of malware issues on the platform. The policy is consistent with Apple’s general philosophy of “sandboxing” applications on its mobile operating system, so apps have limited ability to interfere with each other or alter the overall workings of the phone. The only apparent exception is for Safari content blockers, which use another iOS API to lock out ads or other unwanted material in the iOS web browser. The Freedom ban fell under a catch-all policy that says, “Apps should use APIs and frameworks for their intended purposes and should indicate that integration in their app description,” according to Apple news site MacRumors. Previous reports have indicated that the company has told developers it won’t allow apps that block content in other apps. “Apple just changed their minds, and there’s no easy solution to this.” Apple stays quietĪpple didn’t respond to repeated inquiries from Fast Company.
“At some point, everything changed,” says CTO Tomasz Koperski.
Freedom website blocker software#
Thomas Reed, director of Mac and mobile at security software company Malwarebytes, tweeted in July that his company had also been affected by the apparent policy shift, though Malwarebytes declined to comment further.Īnd Future Mind, a Warsaw-based company that develops an ad-blocking app simply called AdBlock, has also had to change its product after four years of App Store distribution to comply with Apple’s policies.
The makers of the ad blocking software AdGuard, which used a similar VPN technique to filter out unwanted ads, discontinued a version of its software in July after receiving a similar rejection. Instead, explains CEO Fred Stutzman, “It uses the VPN API to basically decide what traffic is going to leave the phone, and what traffic is not going to leave the phone.”įreedom isn’t the only company to have content-filtering software pulled from the App Store. Unlike traditional VPNs that protect privacy by routing internet traffic through encrypted tunnels to secure servers, Freedom didn’t actually send traffic through its own computers. For instance, the app could block connections to from the Facebook app or Safari, or it could block addresses used by streaming platforms to serve up content. But late last month, the company announced that the app had been removed from the iOS App Store, under Apple policies that limit how apps can filter content in other apps.įreedom’s iOS app used the platform’s support for virtual private network technology to block access to internet addresses associated with particular apps.
Users of the Durham, North Carolina, company’s desktop and smartphone apps or browser extensions can choose to block Facebook during business hours, filter out YouTube after dinner, or lock out the entire internet during a busy workday.
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