Congratulations on the HN launch, Tejas. This has been quite many years in the making! Kudos for persisting.
> Compulsive porn usage is a taboo topic. Millions of people want to get away from this behavior, but it's an embarrassing problem to discuss socially.
Definitely: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/ Some folks clearly signal a need for this no doubt, while others who've quit porn, report substantial improvement in their personal relationships, as well.
> Blocking adult content effectively is quite challenging as users will always find ways to bypass the blocking. The difficulty is to make the blocking robust enough that the user can't bypass it, but at the same time that the blocking only happens on adult content and not others (minimizing false positives). We have done a bunch of optimizations on our Android and iOS apps to make it just right – we consider multiple signals before blocking to ensure the blocking is accurate most of the time.
I co-develop an open-source content-blocker for Android based on DNS and IP addresses. The top feature requests have always been around blocking porn and social media. We rely on publicly-curated blocklists for that, so that's one source of lagging indicator where some domains pass through.
Besides, for an Android app to track user's habits (accountability) is achievable, but letting a user never bypass it isn't do-able at all, because the phone and all its Settings are in control of the users themselves. As one example, if users set DNS to point to family.cloudflare.com, they can also unset it just as easily. If the user needs to start the app to track porn/social-media usage, they can also force-stop the app just as well.
A hardware-based firewall like firewalla or PfSense can be more powerful in terms of preventing a bypass network-wide, but it isn't mobile, and its effectiveness is limited to home networks.
So: I am curious (and you stress more than once in your post) how does BlockerX accomplish preventing its users from bypassing block protections?