Friday, 3 October 2025

Ashley Oliver, reporting for Fox Business:

DOJ officials, at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi,
asked Apple to take down ICEBlock, a move that comes as Trump
administration officials have claimed the tool, which allows users
to anonymously report ICE agents’ presence, puts agents in danger
and helps shield illegal immigrants.

“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock
app from their App Store — and Apple did so,” Bondi said in a
statement to Fox News Digital.

“ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing
their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable
red line that cannot be crossed,” Bondi added. “This Department of
Justice will continue making every effort to protect our brave
federal law enforcement officers, who risk their lives every day
to keep Americans safe.”

Fox, in its opening paragraph, describes Bondi as having “asked” Apple to remove ICEBlock from the App Store, but Bondi’s own statement uses the verb “demand”. The difference is not nitpicking. No one, not even Bondi, is claiming any aspect of ICEBlock is illegal. Thus it’s not merely inappropriate but outrageous — and yet another among dozens of other causes for alarm regarding Trump 2.0’s decidedly authoritarian turn — for the DOJ to “demand” Apple do anything about it. But demand they did, and comply did Apple. (Check those lips for Cheetos dust before heading home today.)

Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert, Peter Kafka, and Kwan Wei Kevin Tan, reporting for Business Insider:

Apple has removed ICEBlock, an app that allowed users to monitor
and report the location of immigration enforcement officers, from
the App Store.

“We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to
discover apps,” Apple said in a statement to Business Insider.
“Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about
the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and
similar apps from the App Store.”

ICEBlock developer Joshua Aaron, posting on the ICEBlock Bluesky account:

We just received a message from Apple’s App Review that #ICEBlock
has been removed from the App Store due to “objectionable
content”. The only thing we can imagine is this is due to pressure
from the Trump Admin.

We have responded and we’ll fight this! #resist

There is clearly nothing illegal about ICEBlock.¹ It’s just information, obviously protected by the First Amendment. Law enforcement officers in the United States have no right to avoid being recorded or their actions reported and shared. Reporting and publishing where police are policing is free speech and fundamental to the civil rights and liberties of a free society.

We can all wish Apple had fought this “demand”. I certainly do. John Oliver’s “Fuck you, make me” argument sprung to mind for me this morning. But that’s wishful thinking. I believe there are many lines Apple would not cross, even if it means taking on the ire of Trump administration lickspittles, if not the barely literate wrath of the mad king himself on his sad little blog. Apple may well eventually — if not soon — be forced to define those lines. But keeping ICEBlock in the App Store isn’t one of them. You might believe it should be. There’s a big part of me that believes it should be. But I can also see why it’s not. Pick your battles.

I wrote about ICEBlock twice back in late July. Quoting extensively from my initial post:

The ICEBlock app is interesting in and of itself (and from my
tire-kicking test drive, appears to be a well-crafted and designed
app), as will be Apple’s response if (when?) the Trump
administration takes offense to the app’s existence. Back in 2019,
kowtowing to tacit demands from China, Apple removed from the App
Store an app called HKmap.live which helped pro-democracy
activists in Hong Kong know the location of police and protest
activity. The app broke no Hong Kong laws, but scared the
thin-skinned skittish lickspittles in the Chinese Communist
Party. (Remember too that in 2019, Apple removed the Taiwan
flag emoji (🇹🇼) from the iOS 13 keyboard for users in Hong
Kong and Macau.)

One defense from Apple regarding HKmap.live, however, was that the
iOS app was a thin wrapper around the website, which website
remained fully functional and could be saved to an iPhone user’s
home screen. Removing the app from the App Store thus did not
prevent Hong Kongers from accessing it. (That website today
seems to be defunct.)

ICEBlock is different. It is only available as a native iOS app.
According to the developers, this is for technical reasons. From
their web page explaining why they can’t offer an Android
version:

At ICEBlock, user privacy and security are paramount. Our
application is designed to provide as much anonymity as possible
without storing any user data or creating accounts. While we
understand the desire for an Android version of ICEBlock,
achieving this level of anonymity on Android is not feasible due
to the inherent requirements of push notification services.

To send push notifications on Android, it is necessary to use a
mechanism that requires storing device IDs. This means that we
would need to maintain a privately hosted database to store these
identifiers. Storing such data, even if it’s anonymized,
introduces significant privacy risks. […]

In contrast, iOS offers us the flexibility to deliver push
notifications while adhering strictly to our design philosophy.
Apple’s ecosystem allows for push notifications to be sent
without requiring us to store any user-identifiable information.
This ensures that ICEBlock remains completely anonymous and
secure.

To deliver push notifications on Android, the developers claim
they would need to maintain a database of device IDs, create a
user account system to manage those device IDs, and all of that
server-stored data would be susceptible to law enforcement
subpoenas and pro-ICE red hat hackers. (What “brown shirts” were
to the Nazis, we should make “red hats” to MAGA.)

To maintain anonymity and store zero user data, there is and can
be no web app version of ICEBlock. There is and can be no Android
version. Only iOS supports the security and privacy features for
ICEBlock to offer what it does, the way it does. Here’s to hoping
that Apple will proudly defend it if push comes to shove.

Apple’s removal of ICEBlock from the App Store is, in multiple ways, worse than Apple’s removal of HKmap.live from the App Store back in 2019. First, you cannot take a disagreement with the Chinese government to court. Here in the United States, you can. But Apple chose not to. That’s a display of weakness.

Second, from the perspective of users, without the HKmap.live “app”, Hong Kong iPhone users could still access all the functionality via the website, and the website could be saved to their home screens as a web app that was, I believe, functionally identical to the version from the App Store. I put “app” in quotes above because the HKmap.live app was really just a thin wrapper around the service’s mobile website. Hong Kongers lost some convenience, and they lost the ability to tell non-technical protestor friends “just get it from the App Store”, but it’s not that much more complex to explain how to add a website to your iPhone home screen as a web app.

With ICEBlock, the entire thing is simply no longer available. If you already have ICEBlock installed, the installed version still functions on your iPhone, but, until and if Apple changes its mind, there will be no further software updates and new users are unable to download it. Nor will current users be able to re-download the app on a new iPhone — and now is “new iPhone” season. And, seemingly, there can be no web app (or Android) version of ICEBlock that offers the same level of anonymity as the native iOS version — with notifications, but without user accounts nor any database of device IDs for notifications that would be subject to subpoena from ICEBlock.

The gist of my second post on ICEBlock from back in July is that ICEBlock’s privacy-protecting architecture isn’t magic. It’s based on trust in Apple itself. Joshua Aaron doesn’t have access to ICEBlock users’ device IDs (let alone their personal identities), but ICEBlock can send push notifications to devices because Apple itself does know device IDs and users’ identities.

It’s rather chilling to consider what Apple would have done if the Trump administration had “demanded” a list of device IDs and user identities for everyone who had installed ICEBlock. Or what Apple will do if such a demand pops into one of their dimwitted but cruel minds.² I suspect that’s one of the lines Apple would not cross. That Apple would stand its ground there and say “Fuck you, make us” and take it to court. But there’s only one way to find out.