Q&A

Which apps and websites are blocked?

To protect your wellbeing and your device, drawbridge blocks the following categories: porn, gambling, ads and trackers (which also covers malware, phishing and scam domains), algorithmic social media, AI companions, and games with addictive mechanics or grooming risk. Some social media is genuinely debatable: Reddit and Discord, for instance, have strong community moderation in places, but they also still host a lot of extreme gore content and toxic comments. Either way, sites like that are better visited on a PC. There is no reason to carry them around in your pocket.

Everything else works normally: tools, office apps, weather, banking, public transport, school, work, and so on.

Who is drawbridge for?

Drawbridge is for anyone who needs to carry a smartphone but doesn't want that phone to make room or time for harmful and addictive apps and websites. That can be an adult protecting themselves, or someone managing another person's device (a child, for instance).

Why not just use parental controls or an app blocker?

Parental controls have a lot of downsides:

• They are hard to configure, and there is always some new adjustment to make.
• You have to build up expertise in everything that is harmful and everything that can be configured. That is just wasted time.
• They are easy to bypass, even when well configured.
• They lead to arguments and conflict, between parent and child, or within yourself.
• They spy on the user and may collect data.
• They are often not free.

Drawbridge does not use parental controls at all; it is a device policy controller, the kind used for company phones and kiosks. Unlike parental controls, drawbridge ships out of the box with non-configurable protection that already gives very broad coverage. Social media and harmful games are always blocked, no argument about it. That creates an environment of calm without extra overhead. Be aware that drawbridge alone is not enough as "online guidance for a child". A lot more goes into that, and one best practice remains using the internet on a shared screen, where everyone can see and talk about what is happening (not for private conversations, of course).

How can I turn off or bypass drawbridge?

Drawbridge has both a network filter and an on-device filter, and is therefore about as watertight as it gets. Still, there are plenty of websites and apps that will occasionally show something harmful. Don't hesitate to report it. The classic back door, the browser, is sealed too, and drawbridge offers its own take on browsing (see below).

After setting up drawbridge, a code is shown that lifts the filter and can remove drawbridge. The code is random and too long to memorise at a glance. The choice is yours: write it down and keep it somewhere safe, or don't write it down and forget it, in which case drawbridge stays active forever.

The only other way out, which is also true for ordinary app blockers, is of course a factory reset. That resets the entire device and loses your data with it, effectively the same as buying a new phone. Still: if you manage the device for someone else, such as your child, and the device has a Google account on it, a factory reset requires the Google password. That is a safeguard against exactly this. The drawbridge app also shows the moment of last activation, an extra manual check to see that nothing was reset.

What about WhatsApp and other chat apps?

Facebook Messenger and Telegram are blocked. WhatsApp is blocked by default too, since it increasingly resembles social media (channels, a chatbot). Because WhatsApp is a practical necessity for many people (in some countries people barely make ordinary phone calls anymore), you can choose to allow it anyway. Other chat apps such as Signal, Threema, Session, Briar and so on are allowed, because encrypted communication is a human right. If you are handing the device to a child, know that children under 14 struggle a great deal with group chats, which very quickly turn into cyberbullying and drama.

What about YouTube?

YouTube is, in effect, social media. Although its content is strictly moderated against extremes like nudity, gambling and violence, a lot of harmful or misleading content remains. YouTube serves everything in a highly addictive way, for which Google has already been held accountable in court. The most harmful part of all is YouTube Shorts, which is very hard to distinguish from ordinary YouTube videos and cannot be filtered without either violating privacy or relying on error-prone AI. Because YouTube is so pervasive as a "video library" full of genuinely useful information (cooking, DIY, and so on), a toggle similar to the WhatsApp one is being considered, though nothing is decided yet.

Why aren't chatbots blocked?

Regular chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini can indeed have harmful effects on the brain with excessive use and by replacing cognitively demanding tasks. They are not built with addictive mechanisms, and, much like search engines, increasingly strict guardrails are appearing for certain kinds of questions. The bigger problem, though, is how pervasive chatbots have become: nearly every website or service now has some kind of "assistant" you can ask almost anything. If you don't want that, the honest answer is not to use the internet at all.

What about the browser?

The browser is traditionally the back door through which harmful content reaches your device and your life. A number of browsers and extensions are able to set up a proxy or VPN specifically to bypass the device's settings (often for perfectly good reasons elsewhere, but not here). Drawbridge therefore refuses every browser except herald. Herald is a browser built specifically for drawbridge, though it can also be downloaded on its own, and it blocks the same content as drawbridge by default, out of the box, no configuration needed. A variant, herald mono, is a browser built specifically for digital minimalism: it shows every website in black and white, has no tabs (single-tasking only), and opens everything in reader mode when available. That second browser is especially useful for people who feel they lose too much time to, say, news sites or online shopping.

Under consideration, though not decided, is adding more browsers to the allowed list, ideally including a Chromium-based one for sites that don't work well in Firefox. Another route being considered is letting users run no browser at all, with the risk that some apps simply won't work because they rely on web pages internally.

How will drawbridge keep changing?

Depending on time, resources and technical obstacles, the following features are on the list:

• Allowing YouTube, possibly with a filter
• Curfew: blocking internet access between set hours
• Blocking all video streaming (Netflix, Disney+, Prime, Veoh, ...)
• Whitelisting other browsers
• Blocking browsers entirely
• Allowing Telegram
• "Dumbphone-ification": only specific apps allowed. This can only work on selected devices, since every smartphone ships with different default apps.