this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024

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Best firewall app for my limited needs? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey all,

I want a firewall app for just basically to enforce restrictions on outgoing communication based on service or app. It is mostly to block data harvesting. For reference, if anyone remembers there was one for iPhone called Firewall IP and it was just perfection. That was back when we could jailbreak.

Anyway, so that's all I need. Free is best, of course, but I would pay a bit if it is an exceptionally good product. No problem paying for quality. But I will have no interest in anything that's subscription based, nor anything that I need some kind of backend "approval" or login in order to install and use it. In other words, I want to know that if in a hundred years I happen to have a working phone from today, and the apk file, then I can install it. Obviously that's reductoi ad absurdum but you get my point.

Thanks for any recommendations. P.S. I'm not rooted, if that matters. Although I am still interested in possibly getting a replacement ROM for my device.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

NetGaurd.

Others have said it, I'll say it again.

It gives seperate control over WiFi and cell. So for example my weather widget won't update in background over cell, but on WiFi it can update all day.

Only downside is it takes up your 1 VPN "slot", which might be a bad thing if you a vpn.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Additionally to NetGuard, you also can use RethinkDNS, it does the same thing as NetGuard with a local DNS for ad blocking and some other advanced stuff.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Cool, I’ll look into that as well. Thank you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I am not rooted and running NetGuard on my phone.

Like it quite a bit, gets a bit wobbly on my setup when roaming but happy with it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Are there any system apps that are worth blocking that won't make my phone less useful? Kind of an ambiguous question, I know. I just blocked GBoard, for one.

Oh, never mind. It uses a pseudo VPN to filter traffic, and I'm using an actual VPN, so its not compatible. I only learned this after setting up some rules and finally trying to enable it.

It'd be cool if they integrated a VPN client into the app.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

You should check out RethinkDNS

it's on F-Droid and has everything you need

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Nice! I'll have to try it out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

It's working! Thanks! I got Mullvad configured inside Rethink, and blocked Gboard from the internet. I was enjoying HeliBoard, but it doesn't have emoji search. ☹️ Also, autocorrect on HeliBoard was pretty bad. A combination of too aggressive and not aggressive enough at times. Plus the "swipe spacebar to select text" feature of HeliBoard never felt as good as Gboard.

Of course, now I can't use the GIF feature of GBoard, which was another occasionally useful feature.

Man, does Rethink have a lot of options and settings. Definitely not for the faint of heart!

I also blocked "Speech Recognition and Synthesis from Google" which I think is used when you do voice typing. Voice typing is still working, so that's good. It does most of it locally. Except I noticed months ago that if I have a very spotty cell connection, Voice Typing takes forever to initialize. I thought it was fully on-device at all times, but it turns out it's not.

Anyone else know some other things I should block? I blocked Chrome because I never use it and I pretty much immediately saw it was using the Internet in the background when I enabled Rethink.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Cool, thanks! I will take a look at it.