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Chrome?

It's probably a security risk like Android, and the vast majority use it.

Also, apps are better at sending notifications (like ICE warnings). IMO this is a pretty decent justification for an 'iOS only' app.

Breath - rhymes with 'death', and is what comes out of your mouth

Breathe - the action of breathing

Try to remember it this way: when you add the 'e' on the end, you're really breeeething.

While i agree with the point you are making, its just quite the obvious difference. Medical masks have much much denser material so they dont let water droplets through. These masks are usually just some clothing fabric that is full of big openings and really easy to breathe through.

I think their argument is sounding.

Offering VPN is different from storing private information like a device ID. You don’t get notifications from your VPN.

I'm surprised how non of them were gunned down on self defense,

I did check to see what permissions and data it wants access to. None. That seems like a good sign.

A nefarious app might also want permissions to see all your contacts.

Edit to clarify: The app install page says only "Data Not Collected". I would presume they would list IP and/or location if that were amongst the data collected as I have seen other apps do, but I am certainly no expert. The dev is All U Chart, Inc.

TechCrunch did a traffic analysis: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/iceblock-an-app-for-anonymously-reporting-ice-sightings-goes-viral-overnight-after-bondi-criticism/

I think you aren't that familiar with android. Android's main purpose is to collect as much information on you as possible. Google did not offer it up out of the goodness of their heart. It's integral to their data collection and resale business model.

Only for iOS... Oof.

A honeypot in a walled garden? What has this nation become?

I love how, even when they're using them to hide their face, half of them still don't know how to use a mask and put it under their nose

Yes, it’s not hard for a full stack developer to make. Probably a thousand people already in the fediverse can, including me.

But it cannot be hosted on USA controlled servers, and the developers need to find a way to be anonymous to USA offices

Edit: also some other issues. Cannot put it as an onion service because most people in the USA do not use tor. This means regular domain.

• register domain where cannot be seized
• server must be load balanced or using something like kubernetes
• heavy traffic costs money , how to pay bills without crossing USA banking system? And cannot expose payers or contributors
• where to host?

many people can build it, but most of us have no clue to the obstacles

Not disagreeing. The issues that come with it:

1 - Not many people will install it because you have to disable default security features. Android gives a huge "Your device is insecure" scary message.

2 - Then you'll get the people who will use this for malicious reasons. Even the app store gets copycats that do nothing but steal information.

Thanks for the link.

So the problem is that using Android's push notification system would require ICEBlock to store people's device IDs, which could then be used against them.

I wonder if this could be avoided by using Web Push instead of google's native push notification system. Or perhaps some other push notification system using rotating ephemeral IDs.

…almost none of what is said about Android push notification is true. A lot of apps uses firebase, which does not require the creation of user accounts or whatever to send push notifications to a device.

Either they're completely unfamiliar with it, or they don't want to do it, but what they claim is dubious at best.