Website Filtering: Block Sensitive Sites or Allow Only Approved Websites

Why Blocking an App Does Not Block Its Website

You block the app. Then you open the website instead, and the block you set up ten minutes ago is worth nothing.

This is the hole in most screen-time setups, and it is not the user's fault. Blocking an app and blocking a site are two different mechanisms on iOS, and picking a category of apps does not cover the web at all.

Web lists closes that hole. There are two protections, and they are not interchangeable.

Block Sensitive Websites Across Browsers

This is the one to turn on, and for most people it is the only one they need.

It uses the content filter maintained by Apple inside iOS: a list of adult and sensitive sites that Apple keeps up to date, applied everywhere a web page can appear — every browser, and the pages that open inside other apps. It also turns off private browsing, which is the usual way around any filter.

There is nothing to configure. No list to build, no domain to type, no maintenance as the web changes underneath you.

On a new installation, Upchin turns this on for you the first time you grant Screen Time permission. If you turn it off, it stays off — we do not quietly switch it back on.

Allow Only Approved Websites

The second protection is the opposite shape. Instead of blocking a list of sites, it blocks the entire web and lets through only the sites you have allowed.

It runs continuously, not only during a block. Turn it on and the web is closed until you turn it off, whatever else is happening.

This is unusual. Most tools offer a list of sites to block, which you then have to keep adding to every time you find a new one. An allowlist is the other way round, and it is the only arrangement that does not require you to predict what you will want to avoid.

Limitations of Website Allowlisting

Read this before you turn it on. It is not a formality.

Web pages inside apps are web pages. The full lock does not know the difference between a browser and the little web view your banking app opens to confirm a payment. It blocks both.

Some of those are repairable: the blocked page shows you the domain, you add it to your allowed sites, and that app works again — one domain is usually enough, because the lock stops navigation rather than the resources a page loads.

Some are not. Banking and payment flows in particular move through domains that are opaque, numerous, and not shown to you. You can end up unable to confirm a transfer with no obvious way to fix it.

So the honest advice, which is also what the app tells you on that screen: add the site shown on each blocked page — and if that is not enough, do not use this mode. The sensitive-sites filter does not have this problem, because it blocks a list rather than everything.

Allowed Sites

One list, used by both protections. A site you allow gets through the full lock and through the sensitive-sites filter.

You can add domains by hand or start from a ready-made set. Fifty entries is the limit — enough for the sites a normal life needs, small enough that the list stays something you can read.

What Web Lists Is Not

It is not a category filter. Ticking a category of apps does not block the matching websites. That is why this screen exists separately.

It is not a per-page rule. A site is allowed or it is not; there is no way to allow one section of a site and block another.

It is not tied to your blocks. Both protections run on their own schedule — which is to say, continuously, until you change them.