Gertrude iOS App 1.0 Released

Since Gertrude was released for macOS only in November of 2022, many parents have asked us to bring Gertrude to iPhones and iPads. While we've always been open to the possibility, several things held us back:

1. There are certain major Gertrude features, like screenshots, which we are not able to build on iOS, due to restrictions within Apple's frameworks for privacy and battery usage.
2. By a careful use of Apple's Screen Time parental controls, it was possible to very strictly lock down an iPhone, even without Gertrude.

While #1 still holds, #2 has been becoming less and less true as recent releases of iOS have introduced more and more loopholes in Screen Time. These developments prompted us to begin work on an iOS app, currently called Gertrude Blocker, and available in the App store as of 10/23/24.

The first version of Gertrude on iOS is focused for the time being on plugging holes in Screen Time. It allows parents to install a network content filter that plugs several glaring holes in Apple's Screen Time parental controls, including blocking GIFs in the built-in texting app, and third-party apps like WhatsApp and Skype, blocking spotlight image search, blocking App store images in Apples Messages texting app, and blocking a few AI image search features—all of which are not currently controllable by parents with Screen Time.

Going forward, we are exploring the possibility of slowly expanding the app to offer more features similar to the macOS app—things like configurability from the Gertrude Parent website, unlock requests, notifications, and other fine-grained controls. If you'd like to see us work on this area, please let us know, it really helps to know what our Gertrude parents want us to work on next!

In the meantime, if your child has an iPhone or iPad running iOS 17 or 18, we highly recommend you familiarize yourself with the dangerous loopholes in Screen Time, and give Gertrude Blocker a try. Detailed installation instructions can be found here.