ICEBlock, an iOS Exclusive

Thursday, 24 July 2025

ICEBlock:

ICEBlock is an innovative, completely anonymous crowdsourced platform that allows users to report Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity with just two taps on their phone. In recent years, ICE has faced criticism for alleged civil rights abuses and failures to adhere to constitutional principles and due process, making it crucial for communities to stay informed about its operations.

Modeled after Waze but for ICE sightings, the app ensures user privacy by storing no personal data, making it impossible to trace reports back to individual users. Available exclusively for iOS devices, ICEBlock empowers communities to stay informed about ICE presence within a 5-mile radius while maintaining their anonymity through real-time updates and automatic deletion of sightings after four hours.

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.