It used to be that you could click a link in an app, it opens in your web browser where you're already logged in to the relevant service, so you get to see the content the link points to.
These days, you click a link in an app, it opens in an in-app web view where you're not logged in, so you just see a login screen.
Not even the "open in Safari" button works, since by the time you have the opportunity to click it, you've already been redirected to the login page. You literally have to long-press on the link, copy it, switch to your browser, and paste it in to the omni-bar. I don't understand how this god forsaken industry's UX "experts" have all agreed that this should be the universal user experience.
It's especially bad in apps like Slack, where 99% of the links I'm ever interested in are links to our internal gitlab, some internal knowledge base article, some internal tool, or some other thing that requires being logged in to view any of the content. Links just plain do not work almost ever in Slack without the manual long-press -> copy -> switch to Safari -> paste dance.
Not that it matters, it's still an excellent example of stuff not working because links don't work as links anymore.
Being a "Managed App" through MDM/Intune. Typically it's used when installing corporate apps in a BYOD scenario. The managed apps are isolated from information sharing with unmanaged apps, e.g. policies can be applied preventing copy/paste, access to Files.app, etc. It (and it's isolated storage) can also be remote wiped without nuking the whole device. Edge.app still uses the Safari rendering engine, etc. like is generally the case with 3rd party browsers on iOS.
You can't do this with Safari.app unless the whole device is managed, which doesn't work well for BYOD.
I don’t know whether that’s right, but I read “We have a conditional access policy that requires a “compliant” device to succeed the SSO login. However, only the iOS Edge browser can prove compliance” as “our access policy does not allow logging in from Safari”. If that’s true, it’s not something Edge or Safari does or doesn’t do.
"just" is not an appropriate word here. There's a ton of functionality in the native UI and non-WebKit code.
You can change the Browser Application setting under Preferences after tapping on your Avatar in the Slack app.
But you could be. You could log in from the in-app web view, and it would be remembered and compartmentalised in that app, so that next time you click a link you’re logged in.
It really is a bad user experience all around.
Now you're logging into the same thing in multiple different places. Obviously, the odds of you getting phished go up significantly.
- showing focus-stealing modals when loading the page/app, which breaks the quick look functionality on iOS
- interrupting your workflow with tutorial popups (especially multi-step ones that point to different parts the screen) that demo or upsell a new feature, requiring you to dismiss them to continue
- not having an option saying "I'm a power user, stop explaining shit I already know"
To be honest, if the concept of growth hacking was erased from the universe, pretty much none of this crap would exist. Atlassian, Browserstack: I'm looking at you.
This has been one of my biggest iOS peeves for a long time—I really wish that installing an app wasn’t a commitment to letting it handle all of the links it wants to.
It’s particularly annoying because a lot of apps are terrible at actually handling the link: the app will show a login screen or some kind of interstitial and then just forget where you were going. That stupid behavior isn’t limited to web links either, it’s really great when it’s the app’s own push notification (thus irretrievable once tapped), but which the app will not even open properly 100% of the time.
There are a couple of imperfect workarounds (long pressing, incognito), but mostly I’d just rather have an option to limit or disable this behavior entirely—in the absence of that I’ve actually just uninstalled all of the worst offenders, I’m sick of having a million damn apps.
It doesn’t. App developers have to verify that they own the corresponding domain names that they want to handle with their apps: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/supporting-a...
I find gmail to be the absolute worst offender in this category.
1. They dark pattern you into downloading their browser (they give three options, two of which are chrome)
2. In not launching iOS, I’m not logged into the session I may already have open in safari. Which is incredibly painful for any product that sends notifications via email, which id like to action.
And if I do login, and it asks for an email verification code… fail. I can’t access it in gmail without closing the browser…
3. Their in app browser (or the way they re-write links?) doesn’t seem to play nice with opening the corresponding app. Never seems to work.
Incredibly user hostile.
Is there a better alternative mail client I can use with gsuite?
Gmail app -> hamburger menu (top left), scroll down to settings, Default apps, Browser = "Default browser app (Configure in iOS settings)".
I think I must be misreading your concern - if so, not intentional.
The lawmakers should be competent enough to recognise this problem and have laws against keeping people within the apps for no reason. (The only reason may be to use the web sign-in).
Imagine on desktop computer os, you click a link within WhatsApp app and it opens a window within that app and load the webpage there, without your login cookies, and makes you login if you need using mouse with on-screen keyboard only…
I just tried again and it opened Safari, so maybe at some point they enabled a way to tell it to not do that? I see in the Gmail settings I have a setting checked for use default browser app.
So if you fixed this Gmail or iOS people thank you!
Every link I click on my Android phone opens up and uses my preferred browser; Firefox.
What are you seeing different?
Probably others doing the same. I always open pages in full safari and use NextDns to block trackers in all apps.
Also, as the name implies, this just looks at the URLs. So it's more comparable to DNS level blocking.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkextension/u...
For now I am using wireguard+pihole on a cheap VPS for all my devices. It’s not perfect (data center IP so some places block it) but it’s good enough for now. When I’m forced to update to 26 will definitely look at Wipr since I tested that out and it was really good other than the in-app issue.
This is not really accurate.
The Safari content blocking API and the WebExtensions DeclarativeNetRequest API are comparable. The difference is that WebExtensions are JavaScript and can run in the context of the web page. With WebExtensions, you get DNR plus arbitrary JS, whereas the Safari content blocker API is native code and doesn't run in the context of the web page. The arbitrary runtime JS is what allows you to do things that you can't do with declarative content blocking rules.
You could also have a Safari content blocker with an optional WebExtension for additional functionality with no usage of DeclarativeNetRequest.
That’s exactly what AdGuard and some other content blockers do. The result is that content blocking works everywhere, but it’s most effective in Safari. As a user, I prefer that over the approach of uBlock Origin Lite, which is a pure WebExtension and doesn’t do anything outside of Safari. Too bad, because I prefer using uBlock Origin on other platforms.
Which apps are being updated to stop using it?
The difference is simply that the Safari content blocker API is Apple-specific, so it can be used only on iOS and macOS, whereas uBlock Origin Lite uses the cross-platform DeclarativeNetRequest API, because uBlock Origin Lite is itself cross-platform.
I'm not sure why they did that or whether it's actually improved, but the Apple-specific content blocker API is certainly not deprecated or anything like that.
The biggest difference is that the Safari content blocker API is native, in other words, Swift or Objective-C, whereas DeclarativeNetRequest (invented by Google) is a JavaScript API.
In-app views can't really have DNR unless they also have full browser extensions too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44795825
Edit: at least compared to full uBlock Origin on desktop Firefox. No idea how good or bad are the other mobile solutions.
Most of the time i solve my mobile ad blocking needs by ... not browsing on mobile.
It also now allows blocking even outside of Safari. Though that requires iOS/macOS 26, which I have no intention of installing any time soon, so can’t speak for how effective that is.
And as a bonus : possibility to keep music videos playing while changing app. (A parameter has to be switched for that though)
With brave you can uninstall the native Reddit app and just use the webapp instead, without ads and stupid-ass "It's better in the app!" or "instead of taking a screenshot, use the share button!" messages.
Off-topic but damn how shitty of them to add their own watermark when you download an image from a post, and then they dare to say "Better to use the share button!" if you take a screenshot of it instead.
Regarding playing music videos (I guess you’re referring to YouTube), while the playback pauses when you switch away from Safari or lock the phone, you can unpause it via Control Center while in an other app, or on the lock screen.
I too hoped for a ublock origin with filters lists, kind of what we have on Firefox or even the lite version for chrome but it's not nearly as good.
And we can't say it's apple fault because other adblockers like Adguard does allow customs lists and custom rules.
I also have the same issue with the back button, where that obnoxiously large Google login prompt show up whenever I navigate back to a Stack Overflow page. But it's definitely not all ads that show up when I navigate back. Looking at GitHub issues, it's only Javascript-based blocking that's affected.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/518#issueco...
I use it in conjunction with Adguard and secure DNS, but they also publish configuration profiles for iOS.
Anyone happen to know exactly what the "Protective" option is for/does? I see there is one "Unfiltered", and lots of "Protective + Something" options, which is kind of clear what they do, but just "Protective", what does that mean in practice? Couldn't find any concrete information except "It protects you".
If you check dns0.eu (free dns service for EU provided by the company behind NextDNS), it says they’ve closed down, and refer to DNS4EU or NextDNS.
As for what the different categories cover, they have the block lists they use linked “somewhere” on their page.
I want to say though, that the initiative is sponsored by the EU and has privacy preservation as one of it's main objectives, so until proven, i will assume that this is all circumstantial.
For me at least, it solves exactly the use case i was previously using NextDNS for, which was basically DNS level ad blocking, and while i still have a NextDNS subscription, my previous months of testing have proven DNS4EU to be more stable and slightly faster responding than NextDNS (for my usage).
It works everywhere.
As for the legality, the following text is from their website:
> Yes, our DNS4EU Public Service is completely free for citizens. Although primarily intended for users within the European Union due to our infrastructure's geographic distribution, we impose no restrictions on users from other locations.
Also do you connect to the Albanian VPN all the time? That would mean all the websites you connect to now think your in Albania
I use their WireGuard endpoint with the WireGuard app in iOS. I have the WireGuard app icon next to YT and toggle it as I start using and stop using YT. I’ve set mullvad dns to also block ads etc so if I forget to turn the VPN off it’s not a big deal.
I tried selective routing but it’s impossible to figure out the YT IPs. They overlap with GCP infra and a lot of apps block connections from Albania so they break and the VPN has to be toggled.
If someone knows of a list that only includes YT servers I’d love that because wireguard lets you do routing easily if you have CIDR blocks.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...
You get no ads but everything else sucks. I haven’t tried sibling’s suggestion for vinegar though, I’m taking about stock with a dns blocker.
People always say "vote with your wallet" and that's pretty much why people go any other way than "Subscribe and pay Google money" today with YouTube.
Don't use Youtube then.
It does not actually, a large chunk of the money goes to Youtube.
And actually, I would happily pay for either the creator or myself to fund the content hosting. I pay for Nebula for example.
What I refuse to pay for is a company who has routinely fucked over innocent creators doing nothing wrong, and a company who has threatened to burn those people's livelihoods to the ground for triggering false positives in terribly made automated systems that Google leans on to have a higher profit margin.
What I refuse to pay for is a company who uses their absolute control of the platform to enforce a system of Clickbait thumbnails and titles, by insisting on an adversarial system of surfacing content. I am subscribed to a creator, but if I don't click on their next video one of the first times google shows it to me, google will stop showing me content from that creator that I am still subscribed to. If enough people do not click on it in the first couple impressions, google will not show that video to anyone.
Google will also punish users who make such awful and deplorable content as... War history (accurate or not), until recently swearing, videos about aircraft (somehow ended up labeled as a content mill), An end of year summary and highlights video that is exclusively crafted out of content that exists already live on your channel and is not demonitized but when you release that highlight reel it immediately gets demonitized so since you are a big ish channel you ask your account rep wtf and they tell you oh its a mistake it wont happen again. And then, next year, it happens exactly the same, with the added bonus of this time all the content on your channel that wasn't previously demonitized also gets demonitized to go with it, even though your rep once again says this is a mistake.
Remember how youtube used to have so much small time animation, and some of it was great? Notice how it's gone now? Youtube changed what they were prioritizing in the algorithm, and that killed the entire business of small time animation. An entire era of internet media that started before youtube and drove the power and influence of Newgrounds was just wiped out because it wasn't profitable enough. This was separate from the time that youtube also cut ad rates in half without warning.
I will pay for youtube when they demonstrate that they want good content on their platform. I will pay for youtube when, instead of platforming and supporting and paying big bucks for Mr Beast and his awful empty content, they support channels like Applied Science, and Breaking Taps, and NileRed, and Explosions&Fire, and Thought Emporium, and Stuff Made Here, and BPS.Space, and Jeff Geerling, and Dave from EEVBlog, and Brandon F, and Technology Connections, and Practical Engineering, and How to Cook That, and Ze Frank, and AvE, and the other Mountains of people who make great content that is high quality and well made and carefully done and not feeding into gross addiction systems.
But their hard work does not match Youtube's desire to be a constant churn 24/7 watching ad delivery platform, so google punishes them and rewards the people literally trying to scam children instead.
That is why not pay for Youtube Premium.
I have known this for a long time, and still find it shocking. I run Graphene on a Pixel now (with my own DNS server), so I don't really care, but I feel bad for the hundreds of millions of Apple users who think that Apple is a "privacy-respecting" company.
Absolutely love GOS as well. What are you using for your DNS server?
Maybe that’s true for the NextDNS configuration—I don’t know, I haven’t tested, so I’ll take your word for it—but not true for DNS settings in general.
> turn that off and you're golden.
Unless you want iCloud Private Relay, in which case you’re not.
Orion is webkit and can be set as default browser.
It helps to run everything by Cover Your Tracks[1], too.
Personally I’ve settled on blocking at the DNS level with unbound and a blocklist. It’s not perfect but it limits the blast radius.
Content blockers on iOS don't have "full access". Most adblocking apps provide both a content blocker and an extension, the latter of which is used to work around stuff that content blockers can't block, or bugs that result as of blocking scripts from loading, but they're not needed. You can get 95% of the functionality by just using content blockers.
I took a second look at ad blockers on the app store, and many report that they collect various bits of data. Are you saying that there's a special content blocker component to all of these that can't collect data because they're isolated by iOS? I'm not sure how anyone who isn't a iOS developer is supposed to navigate this. To uBlock's credit, their App Store page reports that they collect no data, but is this enforced by iOS? Or just a checkbox that the developer clicked?
Because the "app privacy" disclosures that apple only contains broad categories about what data the app can possibly collect. If the app collects analytics in the UI itself (ie. the part where you select filters or whatever), it has to say the app collects analytics. It's not possible to say "we only collect analytics on your usage of the app, not what your browsing history is".
>Are you saying that there's a special content blocker component to all of these that can't collect data because they're isolated by iOS?
Yes.
Honestly this is more of an App Store issue than an Adblock one. For all of Apple's purported talents in curation, they really cannot seem to filter out the odd trojan horses: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...
The app was removed a day after your article was posted. The app name, developer, icon, and images are all different. It's absolutely a problem, but it was addressed.
If Apple aggressively took action against this with a high error rate, the headlines would probably be about anti-competition, censorship, and upset developers.
Two-way signature validation. Apple distributes unique developer IDs; make the dev sign the app locally before uploading it, like Google does for the Play Store. If those trojan horses still make it through Apple's manual inspection process, then they need to fire everyone working for the App Store and replace them with AI.
> If Apple aggressively took action against this with a high error rate
They need to take action. Apple's entire argument for an App Store monopoly is that they curate apps individually before they're uploaded to ensure a baseline of quality. When they stop vetting apps and allow the App Store to become like every other store, their argument in favor of monopoly control evaporates.
So yes, it would be anti-competitive censorship, but that's nothing Apple hasn't done before. The real issue is that their "premium" store interface is getting shown-up by the Google Play services. At the going rate there won't be anti-competitive behavior to complain about since Apple will be forced to accept competing storefronts - and they have no one to blame but themselves.
It's funny my Motorolla phone keeps installing random games on it like ugh...
It is a cheap phone I think I got it new at $160 and that's the thing it has 8GB of RAM, the pictures are subpar (blurring) but other than that it works for me, multi-app non-game
This is on Verizon but yeah it'll just install new games and say "Enjoy these new apps" I'm like wtf I think most recently one of the games it installed is Mahjong
edit: apparently it's MotoApps doing it
https://community.verizon.com/t5/Mobile-Network-Archive/Game...
Oh my bad that's literally the link you posted yeah
I got MotoApps from this post https://www.reddit.com/r/motorola/comments/1dl001c/motorola_...
Good read: adblock test sites can be wildly inaccurate (alerting to connections that never made it, given redirect to the local shim resource) and can easily be gamed.
- Does this also block ads on Youtube (in the browser)?
- Can this block Youtube Shorts (they're way too addictive for me)?
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...
I'd almost use the "real" YouTube app with ads on, if I could disable Shorts entirely.
Is there some trick I am missing?
Whether it can use uBlock is just one factor.
Other phones have their own downsides.