It really shouldn't. Plenty of Apple engineers leave the company to work on shady things.
Any app can easily circumvent this "firewall" by simply falling back to hard coded public ips of their servers if the domain lookup doesn't work.
I'm not saying it's a bad app, but it's misleading to call their app a "firewall".
What this is doing is redirecting known domain names to a sink hole. Much like Pihole does.
“ Everything Lockdown Firewall does stays on your phone, so no data is transmitted to any of our servers. This can be confirmed by checking the source code, which is 100% open and public for anyone to examine. Lockdown Firewall doesn't use any type of third party analytics, trackers, or APIs, so there's no risk of your data leaking to third parties. This means there's no Google Analytics, no Facebook Pixel, no Mixpanel, Fabric, Mailchimp, etc — nada.
Information We Collect
Lockdown Firewall collects nothing. It all stays on your device.”
Using the web control panel, pick from high level categories to block, or drill down and select from among the most common of dozens and dozens of block lists. Make one or more configs, so different family members or devices can be blocked differently.
With Lightweight apps for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Chrome OS offering privacy and security benefits of DNS-over-HTTPS. Always-on on all networks automatically to automatically bypass network filtering and government censorship.
Their DNS hosts leverage latency-based routing to automatically use the DNS server with the lowest latency, or use a subset outside "Five eyes" locations.
> VPN with an in-app purchase
Lets pay for a product, and they have the ability to sell that data.
I get, acting like a pi-hole and what-not but, a VPN for that task seems overkill.
I think that’s the only way to perform certain tasks on iOS.
Disclaimer: never used lockdown, not endorsing the product.
This does not mean that your data goes through a VPN server.
If you can figure out another way to pull it off, I’d wager you could make a fair bit of cash. Or at least get a job offer at a lot of places you might like to work.