Status · Not available — removed by its developer
I took this app down because it couldn't do what I said it would.
The Shielded Path was approved by Apple and live on the App Store. I pulled it myself. If you had it installed, or you read something on this site that promised your child was protected, you deserve the whole explanation rather than a maintenance notice. Here it is.
01 · What happened
The core protection could not work on iPhone. Not the way I built it.
The app promised to block harmful content in the browser, on any network. On iOS, filtering Safari requires a Network Extension entitlement from Apple that this app was never going to be granted. The app installed, ran, and looked like it was working. The protection people were relying on was not there.
Apple approved it. Nobody caught it in review. It was live, and it would have kept being downloaded. I found it, and I removed it from sale rather than let one more parent believe their child was covered when they weren't.
What I am retracting, specifically
This page used to make these claims. Each one is withdrawn. I'm listing them rather than deleting them quietly, because a parent who read them deserves to know exactly which sentence was wrong.
- "Blocks WiFi & Cellular." — Withdrawn. The app could not filter browsing on iOS. Not on cellular, not on WiFi. This was the central promise and it was not delivered.
- "Protection starts instantly." — Withdrawn. Activating the shield did not do what the button implied.
- "Now live on the App Store." — No longer true. I removed it. It is not under review and it is not returning in this form.
- Claims about verified blocklists and partnerships with child-protection organizations. — Withdrawn. Those organizations should not have been named on this page the way they were, and any impression that they had reviewed, endorsed, or partnered with this app was mine to create and mine to correct.
If it's still installed on a device, do not rely on it for content filtering. Nothing was wrong with your device or your setup — this was an architectural mistake in how I built the app. It was mine.
02 · What now
I'm rebuilding it on something that actually works.
Filtering has to happen before the phone ever reaches the site — at the DNS layer, not inside an app asking the browser politely. That's the rebuild: per-child profiles, real activity logs that reflect what actually happened, and protection that doesn't depend on a permission Apple won't grant.
It is in a validation phase right now — I am proving the approach works before I write the app around it, which is the step I skipped last time. That's the whole lesson.
I'm not giving you a launch date. I gave this app a promise once before I'd earned it. There's no mailing list on this page and nothing to pre-order. It'll be here when it does what it says.
- On the App Store
- No. Removed by me
- Reason
- Core protection could not be delivered on iOS
- Whose fault
- Mine. Architecture, not Apple
- Old claims
- Retracted by name. See above
- Rebuild
- DNS-level filtering, per-child profiles
- Phase
- Validating the approach before building
- Ship date
- None promised
- Your data
- Never sold. Then or now
03
If you used this app and have a question, ask me directly.
Billing, your data, what to use instead — I read these myself. There's no support queue; there's me.