apple-telemetry
β οΈ Looking for maintainers! #25
Domain blocklists, IP blocklists, and cloaking files for domains that Apple devices frequently contact. DNSCloak is an excellent app capable of using these files, but it's a bit of a pain to get the blocklists onto your device. Services such as updates, App Store, and Apple Pay will probably be blocked by this list. You can remove entries manually, but this is tedious, so I recommend just temporarily disabling the blocklist when necessary.
Here's a vague overview of what each domain is for.
Why?
Users should have more control over the telemetry sent by their smartphones. Not only that, but I've seen a large improvement to my device's battery life while using these blocklists.
Usage (iOS)
- Download DNSCloak, or another app capable of using DNS blocklists
- Navigate to releases
- Copy the desired blocklist to your clipboard (
cloaking-rulesis recommended) - Download Textor, or another app capable of saving text to Files
- In Textor, create a new file and paste the blocklist
- Remove domains for services you wish to use (such as Apple Pay)
- Navigate to the DNSCloak settings and select the saved blocklist
Usage (macOS)
- Add desired hosts to block to
/etc/hosts
Notes
-
This is not an exhaustive list. There are hundreds of domains contacted on a regular basis by Apple devices, with no consistent naming scheme or obvious purpose. If you want to block all domains, you should use a whitelist.
-
Some domains may not be related to Apple. I've had to filter out the domains from my own blacklist log manually. However, some domains such as
weather.comare contacted by built-in applications (Weather). Entries like these belong in this repository.
Contribution
If you come across any other domains, please submit a PR! Add the entries to the blacklist file then run make (you'll also need Python 3 - use the Poetry package manager). It can take a few minutes because it has to make a lot of DNS queries.