Tabaa or Ever Accountable: which one fits an Arabic-speaking user?

Two philosophies: report after the fact, or prevent before it

Ever Accountable is built on a simple and clever idea: you will not browse porn if someone you respect is going to find out. The app sends reports on your activity to an accountability partner, and healthy shame does the rest. Technical blocking is not what that model is for, and that is a design choice, not a flaw. Tabaa starts from the other end: the device itself does not open what is not allowed, and only then do the reports and the human supervisor arrive as a layer on top.

The practical difference is that accountability assumes you can still resist once you know somebody will see. The real moment of weakness does not wait for the weekly report.

Where Ever Accountable genuinely wins

• Tabaa does not run on iOS, macOS or ChromeOS at all. If your device is an iPhone, this comparison is settled against us in the first line.
• The accountability model itself is mature: the reports are written to be read by a human being and to open a conversation, not to be a technical log.
• You install it straight from the store, with no device provisioning and no factory reset. That is a real obstacle on our side, not a footnote.
• It suits the mutual-support-group culture it grew out of, where shared accountability matters more than hard blocking.

The comparison table

Where Tabaa wins: blocking at the device level, not the account level

Tabaa is installed with the Device Owner privilege, Android's official device-management mechanism. A disallowed app is not watched until it can be closed; it is suspended by the operating system itself. The result is that the blocking holds under any alternative launcher, with any SIM, on Wi-Fi and on mobile data alike, and whether or not anyone is signed in to a Google account.

• There is no hidden space that escapes the policy: adding a new user and switching between users are both blocked, second space and the work profile are locked by default, and on Android 15 and newer cloned apps and private space are locked as well.
• Accounts are not part of the equation: Tabaa places no restriction whatsoever on Google accounts. Sign in with as many as you like; protection is bound to the device rather than to an account, and adding or switching an account changes nothing about it.
• It cannot be switched off from inside the phone: the system removes the Force stop and Clear data buttons from the app's page, and the blocking returns after a reboot and after the system kills the app. Removal stays possible, but only through a factory reset whose key is with the supervisor.
• Speed you notice: a blocked app closes in about a third of a second, any change the supervisor makes reaches the phone in about three seconds, and instantly when the push message arrives from the server. If the app happens to be open at the moment it is blocked, it closes at that same moment.
• Updates are silent and self-installed: an improvement to the protection reaches every device without anyone doing anything and without going through an app store.

The filtering reaches inside the apps themselves

Tabaa pins encrypted Private DNS at operating-system level, points it at its own filtering server, and then locks the setting so it cannot be changed. Every DNS query on the device goes through it: the browser, the WebView embedded in a game or a chat app, and apps running in the background. No app has to integrate with Tabaa for its content to be filtered. Underneath that, 47 VPN, Tor, proxy and DNS-changer packages are blocked in every mode, and suspended even when they were already installed on the device.

And we will tell you the whole truth: DNS filtering needs Android 9 or newer, and an app carrying its own DNS resolver inside it may route around the filter. That is exactly why the 47-package list and the lock on the VPN setting sit underneath it. Read why DNS filtering alone is not enough to see where each layer stops.

Why Tabaa does not ask for the Accessibility permission

The ordinary Android blocker runs on an AccessibilityService: a permission that lets an app read everything on your screen so it can work out what you have opened. Tabaa declares no such service at all, declares no notification-listener service, installs no VPN on the phone, and asks for no camera, no microphone, no SMS, no contacts and no photos or files.

That has a practical consequence which matters to Egyptian users in particular. Some banking and payment apps restrict how they work, or refuse to run, when another app on the phone holds the Accessibility permission, because it is the same permission banking-fraud malware abuses. InstaPay and the National Bank of Egypt app have both published release notes describing a change in how the app behaves on devices where "advanced system permissions" have been granted. Tabaa never asks for that permission, so there is nothing on your phone for the bank app to object to.

And we will not exaggerate in the other direction: Tabaa runs on Device Owner, the highest privilege Android grants an app, and it needs the Usage Access permission, which a human grants by hand. The difference is not the size of the permission but its kind: a device-management policy, not reading your screen.

Four modes, and the supervisor sets them

A phone running Tabaa is not one single state. There are four modes in a fixed order of priority: strict focus beats sleep, sleep beats study, and study beats normal.

• Sleep and study are daily time windows in which only the apps the supervisor picked for that particular window will open.
• Strict focus is a full-screen countdown for a set length of time during which nothing opens at all, not even calls. The system pins it in kiosk lock, it survives a reboot, and it needs no internet because its end time is stored on the device.
• The clock itself is secured: the window is measured by the phone's clock, and that clock is pinned automatically to network time whenever any mode is active, so moving the clock forward does not jump over a window.

And the person who decides the mode is the supervisor, from their own app, not the phone's owner. That is the point: having modes is not remarkable in itself, but having the switch in somebody else's hand is what makes them work in the moment of weakness.

What does the supervisor actually see?

One supervisor account manages several devices arranged in groups, and every device has an activity report, a week-by-week usage view, the full list of installed apps with their icons, daily time limits for each app on its own, an instant device lock, and a message that can be pushed to the screen. There is also the phone's location on a map with a short trail of its recent movement; the location permission is granted by device policy, so no permission prompt appears for the phone's owner to refuse.

That is real power over a human being, so choose your supervisor with care, as we explain in the guide on making a friend your supervisor. Tabaa does not build its model on sending snapshots of your screen to a partner; it builds it on preventing access in the first place, and then showing the supervisor how the device was used.

In Arabic, and in Egyptian pounds

The interface, the reports and the supervisor app are in Arabic, and WhatsApp support is answered by a human being in Arabic on +201507966165. Payment is Egyptian, electronic and in pounds: 200 EGP a month or 2,000 EGP a year for the phone, and 100 EGP a month or 1,000 EGP a year for the Windows program, or 300 EGP a month for both together. For families there is a multi-device ladder on the phone: 200 EGP for the first device, then 150 EGP for the second, then 100 EGP for every device after that. The details are on the pricing page.

And when a subscription expires we do not hold the device hostage and we do not unlink it: it drops to a read-only default state with the core locks still running. An expired subscription does not mean an exposed phone, and it does not mean a dead one.

Can you combine both models?

Yes, and that is in fact what Tabaa is: hard technical prevention with a human supervisor reading the reports, which is accountability on top of blocking rather than instead of it. If there is nobody around you who fits the supervisor's role, there is the "make us the supervisor" service, where the Tabaa team holds the key. Installation needs a factory-reset device, so start from the guide on installing without losing your data and then the installation page. And take a look at the full comparison of blocking apps if you want to see the whole market in one table.