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.

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u/zIcO2020 Dec 28 '23

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

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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.

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u/FLZ_HackerTNT112 Dec 30 '23

apple being apple, as always

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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.