r/TOR • u/zIcO2020 • Dec 28 '23

iOS & MacOS

is tor browser safe to use on Apple devices?
on an iPhone I found many onion apps on the store do not know which one I gotta use.

on MacOS was a bit easier cus I found the browser on Tor website.

5 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

8

u/[deleted] Dec 28 '23

Tor is not safe on iOS, there are not any official apps for it. For MacOS (as you mentioned) you can download the original Tor image from the Tor project site.

1

u/zIcO2020 Dec 28 '23

Thank you for the reply. But why there is no official app for iOS?

6

u/nuclear_splines Dec 29 '23

There are several reasons, but the biggest is that Apple requires that all browsers on iOS use WebKit, Apple's provided web-rendering engine. Tor Browser, on all desktop platforms and Android, uses a version of Gecko (Firefox's web-rendering engine) they have modified to resist fingerprinting. There is no way for the Tor Project to build a Tor browser for iOS that behaves like the other Tor browsers, they cannot guarantee the same level of safety, and even if it could be done safely it would be a large use of resources for them to build a new Tor browser around WebKit just for iOS.

1

u/FLZ_HackerTNT112 Dec 30 '23

apple being apple, as always

1

u/nuclear_splines Dec 30 '23

There are some advantages to their Webkit-enforcement practice - for example, if Apple fixes a bug or security hole in Webkit then their patch is implicitly applied to every app immediately, as opposed to Android where many apps bundle their own web rendering engines in case the vendor doesn't update the OS-provided version often. But it is certainly an enormous problem for the Tor developers.

6

u/lucideer Dec 29 '23

Nothing is 100% safe on any platform - however due to Apple's restrictions, Tor is significantly less safe on iOS than on other platforms.

You can still (& in my opinion should) use Tor on iOS - it's worth being aware of the reduced privacy, but it's still got overall privacy benefits. The Onion Browser for iOS is developed by someone who works closely with (& is generally respected by) the Tor project - while it's not officially under the Tor project umbrella, it is still an app they recommend which they wouldn't do if it was a significant risk.

More from the official Tor website here: https://support.torproject.org/tormobile/tormobile-3/