They don’t even need to MITM the traffic. Just the fact that an app makes network requests when using a supposedly offline feature should immediately get them rejected.
And iOS should introduce a visible network activity indicator that can’t be manipulated by applications, like they do for location tracking.
I think this is already a thing in China.
> Further, the user should be able to control what domains/hosts the app has access to. The user should be able to have feedback indicating that the application is communicating over the network at what times and with how much data.
This is difficult to do, since it's easy to swamp the user in prompts for every little thing.
I don't see this as a bad thing. It will let me quickly see what apps are built not following best practices.
I would even surmise that a user's patience threshold for that kind of annoyance these days is pretty low.
In principle it's nice to be able to manually allow / reject individual requests, but in practice you can't get anything done if you do. Popups keep popping up all the time, and it's rarely clear what the request is good for. Then you get random failures, because you accidentally blocked an important request, or you just allow anything anyway, because there really is no way to know if that request is good or bad.
And that's from the perspective of a software developer who understands what protocols and ports and addresses are.
A firewall like that would be absolutely useless for non-technical users.
Basically I want Little Snitch built into iOS as a core feature. Hiding it behind “Advanced..” is fine.