Websites: block a list, or allow only a list

Blocking apps and leaving the browser open is a door with no wall around it. Every blocked app has a website, and the website is one tap away in Chrome.

Two shapes

• <b>Blocklist.</b> Name the domains this mode blocks. Everything else browses normally. This is the right shape for most evenings.
• <b>Allowlist.</b> Name the only domains allowed, and the rest of the web is shut for the session. This is the shape for a revision block — your course site, your notes, nothing else.

Allowlist mode does one extra thing worth knowing about: it also shuts browsers Spark cannot read. A browser whose address bar is invisible to the app would otherwise be a way around the list, so the honest behaviour is to close that route rather than pretend the list covers it.

The adult filter

A separate, always-on switch rather than part of a mode, because it is not an hours thing. On Android it works from a domain list the app downloads and keeps current, plus any domains you add yourself. On iPhone it uses Apple's own web-content classifier.

It can be latched. Once it is on, turning it off needs a tap on your Spark — the same asymmetry as everything else here, applied to the switch most likely to be flipped at 1 a.m. by somebody who will wish it had been harder.

The honest limits

• Domain-level filtering is not content-level. A blocked domain is blocked; an unblocked one is not, whatever is on it.
• On Android this reads the address bar through the accessibility service — a broad permission, granted deliberately.
• No filter of this kind is complete. Treat it as removing the easy route, not as a wall.