Network Extension Help

Question

Created Nov ’17

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Is it possible to restrict internet access to particular iOS app like whatsapp, instagram from our own ios app ? like parental control app. How?

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Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

Nov ’17

like parental control app.

Not really. While Network Extension has some facilities that could be abused to implement such a feature [1], there’s nothing that provides for per-app networking restrictions like this. Feel free to file an enhancement request for the features you need, but keep in mind that iOS does not, in general, provide system management APIs, but rather exposes this sort of functionality via the config profile mechanism.

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[1] Such as:

Per-app VPN (app proxy providers and packet tunnel providers in per-app mode) — There’s a couple of problems with using this for implementing restrictions, the biggest being that it’s only available on managed devices (it requires that the target app be installed via MDM).
Filter provider — This sees the network traffic but doesn’t get any information about the app that generated that traffic. Also, it is only available on supervised devices.

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