Ask HN: Why has iOS never had a control for restricting an app's network access?

iPhoneOS/iOS/iPadOS has typically been good at providing privacy controls to the user, allowing them to choose whether to give an app access to their contacts, media, location, etc. They've also iterated on this over the years — moving from allowing you to only share all of your media or none of your media to allowing you to select which media can be accessed by an app. Similarly for location, instead of either sharing your precise location or not, you can now choose whether to give an app precise location, or a more general location.

However — I've thought on and off for years — I feel like an omission is a toggle to restrict an app's network access. I would be much more willing to give an app other permissions if I knew my data couldn't be uploaded somewhere. But in its current state, I almost never give an app permission to access (for example) my contacts because I assume that data will be uploaded and stored.

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If I remember correctly, custom keyboard extensions don't have access to the network by default, unless you explicitly give them that permission. Why hasn't this been extended to all apps?

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This also brings up another question — why has iOS never had fine-grained control over which contacts you share with an app? (Similar to how they updated the photos/media permissions in the last few years.)