Changelog

Site update — August 14, 2026 · Headlines in one color

Website only; no change to the app.

• The headline no longer fades from one color into another across the letters. A gradient poured through text is the house style of every generated landing page on the web, and it was on the hero here, on the small uppercase label above each section, and on the license label in the purchase panel. The words are one solid color now — the accent this page already used everywhere else — so the headline finally matches the page under it.
• The figures on the download-stats page were faded the same way and are plain white now. The color belongs to the bars beside them, not to the digits.
• Gradients are kept where they belong — the buttons, the app tile and the rule above the support panel are untouched. It is only text that stopped fading.
• No change to the app.

1.6.1 — August 13, 2026

Nothing else changed — same features, same rules, same log. If you have automatic updates on, Blockr will offer this to you on its own within about a week; you can also take it now from Blockr ▸ Check for Updates…

Changed

• Blockr’s green, inside the app, now matches the green everywhere else. The icon in your Dock, the website and the installer window were all redrawn on a slightly cooler, deeper green a while back; the app’s own buttons, links, selected rows and switches were left on the older one, so the app never quite matched the icon that launched it. They are the same green now.
• The installer window is on that green too.

Site update — August 13, 2026 · Blockr’s own green, everywhere

• The headline on this page faded out into a blue that isn’t Blockr’s. It was left over from the color scheme Blockr used before its icon was redrawn, and it had survived every pass since — so the page was selling a blue-green app while the one that installs is green.
• The Blockr tile beside the name, in the header and on the hero, now matches the icon in your Dock. It had been a lighter, flatter green that was close enough to look deliberate and never actually matched.
• The preview image shown when a link to this page is shared — in a message, a chat, a post — was drawn on a navy background with pale blue labels on it. It is Blockr’s green now.
• No change to the app.

1.6.0 — August 13, 2026

Blockr updates itself: it checks for a new version about once a week and offers to install it in place, refusing any download that isn’t signed by us. You can turn that off under Settings ▸ General ▸ Updates, and you can always check by hand from Blockr ▸ Check for Updates…

Added

• Filter the connection log. Right-click any connection and hide that app, that host, or that whole domain from the list. It came from a user who pointed out that macOS’s own background services make so many connections that everything else drowns in them — which is true, and no amount of scrolling fixes it.
• It hides rows and nothing else. Nothing is blocked or allowed differently, no rule is written, and none of it ever reaches the network filter. A hidden app is filtered exactly as it was a second earlier, its connections are still counted, and its rule still applies.
• A count of everything hidden sits above the list the whole time anything is hidden, and opens the list of what’s doing it. Each entry shows its own share of that count and removes in one click.
• A blocked connection is shown even when an entry would hide it. You can silence something noisy; you can’t silence the moment it gets blocked. There’s a switch for it, in that same list, on by default.
• An app hidden from All Traffic still appears in the sidebar, marked, and opening it shows its connections with a line saying why the two views differ. Emptying the list by hiding everything says exactly that rather than “No traffic yet”, and an export tells you how many connections it is leaving out before you save it.
• Fully keyboard-operable and announced to VoiceOver: the same three choices appear in a Filter Out menu whenever a row is selected, since a table row’s context menu can’t be opened without a pointer.

Fixed

• Sorting the connection log by any column no longer hangs Blockr. Clicking a column header on a full log — 5,000 connections, the default — pinned a core at 100% and never came back, leaving the window dead until the app was force-quit. Present since the log had sortable headers.
• Reversing a sort moves every row at once, and that reorder was being applied row by row inside a view arrangement where each step re-entered the previous one, so the cost climbed far faster than the number of rows: 1,000 connections took 23.6 seconds and 5,000 never finished. The list is now rebuilt outright when the sort changes, which takes about a quarter of a second. Live traffic still updates in place.

Site update — August 12, 2026 · What actually connects to the internet

• A privacy answer on this page was wrong, and is fixed. It said nothing was “checked for automatically” — which stopped being true once Blockr gained the ability to update itself. Conversions, and everything you open, were never sent anywhere and still aren't; the claim about connections was the part that was false.
• Every connection Blockr makes, in full: a check for a new version about once a week; the optional reverse-DNS lookup; blocklist downloads, but only for lists you subscribe to and fetched straight from the publisher; and, if you switch on Encrypted DNS, your DNS queries going to the resolver you picked. Nothing about your files is in any of them, and the update check sends the app version and nothing more.
• The update instructions were out of date. They described downloading a new copy and dragging it over the old one. Blockr updates itself — it checks about once a week and offers to install the new version in place, refusing any download that isn't signed by us. You can still replace it by hand, and you can turn the automatic check off.
• No change to the app.

Site update — August 12, 2026 · Readable buttons and small print

• The buttons in the header say what they say. The Tip and Download pills were drawing their label at 55% opacity over a colored fill, which measured as low as 1.6:1 against it — well under the 4.5:1 the accessibility guidelines ask for. Their labels are now solid, and the fill behind them is set a shade deeper so the text genuinely clears that bar.
• The Subscribe and Support buttons too. Their labels were colored for one end of a two-color gradient and disappeared into the other end. Both now use a single fill that the label is legible on all the way across.
• The newsletter note, the “More apps” caption and the version line under the download button were all set too faint to read comfortably; each is now above the AA threshold.
• Keyboard shortcut chips are legible against their own background.
• The screenshot viewer no longer makes every visit quietly re-download this page as if it were an image — a wasted request on each load.
• No change to the app.

Site update — August 12, 2026 · The twoplus11 logo, back to its own color

• The twoplus11 wordmark in the top-left corner is the studio’s blue again. It had been recolored to match Blockr’s accent color, which made the same logo look like a different one on every app’s site. It now matches twoplus11.com and the rest of the apps.
• No change to the app.

Site update — August 11, 2026 · Clearer search results

• The description under this site in Google is no longer cut off. It ran past the length Google shows and broke mid-word; it now reads as a complete sentence.
• Sharing a link to the privacy, terms or changelog page now shows a proper preview card instead of a bare URL.
• The sitemap now reports when each page actually changed, so search engines re-check pages that have been updated instead of assuming they are stale.
• No change to the app.

1.5.1 — August 11, 2026

A grey band at the top of the window, hiding the row underneath it.

• Fixed: a grey band across the top of the window. Reported by a user running the macOS 27 beta, where it appeared every time. The band covered the status strip — the row that tells you whether the extension is connected and the filter is running — and the buttons underneath it still responded to clicks, so the only way to reach them was to guess where they were.
  Blockr was restyling its own window on the way up, left over from chasing an unrelated layout bug in 1.4.0. That fought with how macOS lays the window out, and when macOS won, the title bar was left painting over the top of Blockr's own content. It no longer touches the window at all, which is both the fix and the smaller amount of code. The monitor now uses the standard macOS split-view layout, so the sidebar runs the full height of the window.

Site update — August 9, 2026 · The Map screen

• Added a Map section to the product page, with a screenshot of the screen. The map arrived in 1.4.0 and this site had never shown it — the page went straight from the connection log to the rules table, so the one screen that answers “where is all this actually going?” was invisible unless you had already installed Blockr. The new section covers the offline country lookup, what a red dot means, the sortable table under the map, and that marking your own location is optional. No change to the app.

Site update — August 9, 2026 · Corrected wording

• Corrected how this site describes Blockr's dependencies. The footer, the requirements box and the 1.2.0 notes below all said “no third-party dependencies”. That is not accurate and has not been since 1.2.0: Blockr bundles Sparkle, the open-source framework behind Check for Updates…. It is the only non-Apple component in the app.
• The same lines paired that with “nothing uploaded”. Blockr checks once a week for a new version, that check reaches our server, and we count it — described in full in section 4 of the privacy policy since August 6. What Blockr sees — which app connected where — still never leaves your Mac, and the check can be switched off. No change to the app itself.

1.5.0 — August 9, 2026

Rules that follow the network you're on, and encrypted DNS with Blockr as the resolver.

• Rules that follow the network you're on. A profile is a separate set of rules that applies on one network and nowhere else — so an app can be allowed at home and blocked on your phone's hotspot, without you changing anything when you move between them.
  Networks are recognised by their router, not their Wi-Fi name. Reading a network's name on macOS needs Location permission, and Blockr declines to ask for that; the router is free to read, tells two networks apart more reliably than a name does, and works the moment you connect. So Blockr never asks where you are, and you name your own networks.
  Nothing changes until you make a profile. Everything you have already set becomes the default profile, which keeps applying everywhere you haven't made one, and a new profile starts as a copy of it rather than as a blank set that would begin blocking everything the moment it was created.
• Encrypted DNS, with Blockr as the resolver. Every name your Mac looks up normally travels in plain text, where the network can read it and answer it. Blockr can now do that resolving itself, over HTTPS, to Cloudflare, Quad9, Google, or any endpoint you name.
  It also makes blocklists strictly better: a blocked name is refused as a name, before an address exists — answered “no such name”, which fails immediately instead of leaving an app waiting on a connection to nowhere.
  This installs nothing new — the proxy lives inside the filter extension you already approved, so there is no second system extension. macOS asks permission once for the DNS proxy itself. If the resolver stops answering, Blockr steps out of the path and lets macOS resolve normally. Off until you turn it on, in Settings ▸ Encrypted DNS.
• Fixed: the menu bar icon was too small. Reported by a user, and they were right — the shield drew at 14×15pt inside a 22pt menu bar, against system glyphs nearer 18. It is now 17×18.
• Fixed: Blockr no longer filters its own traffic. The DNS proxy reaches its resolver over HTTPS, and those connections arrived at the filter as a nameless root process nobody had a rule for — so “block unknown apps” could have cut off the Mac's own resolver, and every name lookup with it.

1.4.0 — August 8, 2026

Block ads and trackers everywhere at once, and see where your Mac actually talks to.

• Blocklists. Subscribe to published lists of ad, tracker and malware domains — StevenBlack, oisd, HaGeZi or 1Hosts — and Blockr drops those connections for every app on your Mac, without you writing a rule for each one. Nothing is on by default.
  No list ships inside Blockr and none is copied to our servers: each is downloaded straight from its own publisher, checked for updates once a day at most, and kept working from the last copy if the publisher is unreachable. Those requests go to them, not to us — we never learn which list you chose.
  A list always loses to a rule you wrote, so an exception is just a host rule — and Check a domain tells you whether something is on a list and offers to add that exception in one click. Every blocked connection records which list caught it and which entry matched, in the monitor and in CSV exports.
• Blockr can now tell which domain an address belongs to. A connection reaches the filter as an IP address, but blocklists are lists of names. With a list enabled, Blockr reads the DNS reply that produced the address — on port 53, in memory, never written down and never leaving your Mac — which is what lets a list apply to nearly every connection instead of the few that arrive carrying a hostname. It also catches trackers hiding behind a first-party name. Switchable in Settings ▸ Blocklists; encrypted DNS is invisible to it, as it is to every filter of this kind.
• A map of where your traffic goes. Every connection placed on a world map by country, sized by how many and colored by whether Blockr let them through, with a sortable table beside it. The country lookup is offline — a bundled table, so a firewall never hands a third party a running list of everywhere you connect.
• A blocklist now outranks allowing an app. Allowing Safari has never meant allowing every destination Safari reaches, and a subscribed list applies inside apps you have already allowed.
• Fixed: Blockr could report protection it was not providing. If the compiled blocklist failed to save, Blockr still remembered the domain count — so it would say “99,557 domains blocked” on the next launch while handing the filter an empty list. The count now never outlives the list it describes, and a missing list is rebuilt rather than silently cleared.
• Fixed: a corrupted list entry could have blocked an entire country. A list shipping a bare registry suffix such as co.uk would have taken out every site under it. Those are now never matched on their own.
• Fixed: the window could lose its status bar, search field and footer when Blockr could not reach its filter, leaving connection rows drawn up under the traffic-light buttons.
• Clearer status. The strip now says when new apps are being allowed or blocked silently — previously it read as healthy while Blockr had quietly stopped asking about anything new. And when the filter is unreachable, Blockr no longer claims nothing is being filtered: your existing rules are still enforced, and it says so.

1.3.0 — August 7, 2026

Two things people asked for, plus one bug that would have cost you your history.

• Blockr no longer asks you about macOS itself. Software Update, iCloud, the App Store, Mail, Spotlight and the long tail of system daemons are allowed without an alert, so the alerts you do see are about apps you chose to install. On by default — Settings ▸ General ▸ Trust Apple’s own apps and services turns it off.
  Your own rules still win: block an Apple app and it stays blocked. And a signature says who built a program, not what it will do with a connection — so the general-purpose tools macOS also ships are still asked about, even though Apple signs those too: curl, ssh, openssl, the shells, osascript, python, perl, ruby, php. Those are how traffic leaves a Mac without anyone having to ship a program of their own.
  Trusted connections are still recorded in the monitor, tagged Apple, and carried into CSV exports in a new Reason column. Nothing is allowed invisibly.
• Minimizing the monitor now hides Blockr to the menu bar instead of folding the window into the Dock. The app is still running, the filter is still up, and the menu-bar shield was already the place to find it — a window in the Dock tray was just a second place to look. The yellow button and ⌘M both do this, and the button says so when you hover it or reach it with VoiceOver.
• The monitor explains itself once. Until you’ve put the window away for the first time, it tells you that closing or minimizing doesn’t stop Blockr. After that it never mentions it again.
• Fixed: your connection history now survives Blockr’s own updates. A single field added to the log format would have made the whole history file unreadable, and it is read all-or-nothing — so the entire record of what your Mac had been talking to would have silently vanished on upgrade.

1.2.1 — August 5, 2026

Two fixes to getting set up, both reported by people who hit them.

• Blockr now shows you where to approve it. While macOS waited for the system extension to be approved, Blockr said “Waiting for approval in System Settings” and left you to find the pane yourself — and if you missed the notification, there was nothing left to click. The status now comes with a button that opens Login Items & Extensions directly, and names Network Extensions as the section to switch Blockr on in.
• Settings opens from the menu bar without the monitor window. Choosing Settings while Blockr was tucked away in the menu bar opened the window behind whatever was in front, with no Dock icon to bring it forward — so it looked like nothing happened unless you opened the monitor first.

1.2.0 — August 4, 2026 · Initial public release

First release. See every app on your Mac that reaches the internet — and stop the ones that shouldn't.

• Connection alerts — the first time an app opens a connection, Blockr holds it and asks. Allow or block, remember it as a rule or not, and scope the answer to the whole app or just that one host. One alert per app, never one per connection.
• Per-app and per-host rules — allow or block everything an app does, or name an exact host, an address, or a wildcard like *.example.com, with an optional port. Host rules outrank app rules, so you can allow an app and still cut off a single tracker.
• Live connection log — every connection with its app, remote host, port, verdict and time. Search by app, host or port, filter to just what was blocked, and sort on any column. Right-click a row to write a rule from it.
• History that survives relaunch — connections and per-app totals are kept on disk, so the monitor is never blank. Export to CSV or JSON.
• Hostnames, not just IPs — reverse DNS resolves addresses lazily, only for rows on screen, and caches the result.
• Rules manager — every rule in one screen, including apps that aren't running, plus Add App… to write a rule before an app has ever connected.
• Choose what new apps get — ask me (the connection is held while Blockr asks), or allow/block silently with no alert at all. A separate setting covers what happens while Blockr isn't running.
• Pause protection — allow everything and stop asking for 15 minutes, an hour, or until you resume (⇧⌘P). Never survives a relaunch.
• Start at login — while Blockr isn't running, unknown apps get your chosen default action.
• Optional block notifications — a blocked connection fails silently inside the app that made it, so Blockr can tell you, rate-limited to one per app per minute.
• Private by design — Blockr decides when a connection opens and never inspects, decrypts, or proxies what flows through. No account, no analytics, nothing uploaded.
• Native SwiftUI. Menu-bar app, light + dark mode, full keyboard support, WCAG 2.1 AA.
• Signed and notarized by Apple — macOS 14+, Apple Silicon & Intel.
• Free for personal use forever, including updates; commercial use requires a one-time $5-per-device license.