What It's Like to Use Apple's Lockdown Mode | Hacker News Reader

What It's Like to Use Apple's Lockdown Mode

wired.com

36 pointsBrajeshwar16 comments

I recently turned on Lockdown Mode on iOS, and it has been pretty good. Very little impact for the much higher security. So far I've noticed:

- YouTube doesn't play videos for me (signed out, Firefox/Safari) on iOS. Not sure if this is linked to lockdown tbh.

- The new contact poster shares get automatically blocked. I haven't found out how to accept those for trusted contacts?

- Location sharing was automatically turned off.

- Facetime calls get blocked automatically unless I've called the contact previously. Signal calls still go through.

Every app that launches a webview gets a notification that this is running in lockdown mode on the first webview launch. Hilariously, this happened for the Airpod Setup app as well, which used webviews for showing me some legalese.

I use Lockdown mode and YouTube (website) works for me using the Vinegar extension.

You can opt-out the WebView/in-app-browser of specific apps from lockdown mode, which might help with Youtube (if you opt out Firefox). Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Lockdown Mode > Configure Web Browsing. Then uncheck whichever app's webviews you want to exclude from it.

You can also opt out specific websites in Safari, while browsing, by tapping the settings icon in the left of the URL bar, then Website Settings, then unchecking Lockdown Mode.

For anyone not familiar with Vinegar, it replaces the heavy YouTube player with a minimal HTML video tag, which restores PIP and background playback. $2, highly recommended.

> if you opt out Firefox

This seems to negate much of the proposed benefit for lockdown mode in the first place, no? Browsers are one of the attack/tracking vectors this mode was designed to mitigate, albeit with a virtual hammer.

Yes, but it's because Firefox "browser" is an app with WebViews. If you want more fine-grained opt-out then you should use Safari and opt out of websites on an individual basis. For other apps, it makes sense to opt-out on a per-app basis, for example I had to opt-out Deliveroo so I could upload a photo of my receipt in their WebView.

I'm not sure why anyone uses Firefox/Chrome on iOS anyway. It's the same browser engine as Safari. Personally I'm quite happy with Safari and extensions for content blocking.

This is a recent change. Youtube worked just fine for months in Lockdown mode. I've always assumed it was due to Google clamping down on ad-free viewing via mobile Safari.

I've had it on since it was released, and haven't really noticed any downsides. I think some people who are really into using their phones might feel somewhat constrained, but really no one should be a heavy phone user in the first place.

I enabled Lockdown mode mostly for restricting inbound messaging in iMessage as that seems to be the common entry point, and it's not something that's easy to stop from a end user's perspective.

Doing so broke my apple watch integration, which to me is a bad balance between security and functionality. I wish they gave fine grained control over what protection get's implemented and what it will break.

Have you tried again after the update?

> As part of Apple's most recent updates for Lockdown Mode in June, the company added support for Apple Watch

The only downside I experienced with using Apple Lockdown Mode is that my apple watch wont vibrate or notify me of incoming phone-calls on my iPhone.

sounds like a feature

Paywall bypasses: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.wired.com/story/apple-lo...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240102160143/https://www.wired...

Or simply turn off JavaScript.

That's what it is! for months I had a trick for getting around paywalls and I just realized that that's all I'm really doing... You learn new things every day, especially when starting out...

You should check out https://noscript.net/

Thanks! I was basically inspecting the page and reloading with 'pause on caught and uncaught exceptions' but I think that all that did was pause some Javascript before it ran.

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