I am an adult and I want to block pornography for myself - how?

Why do the solutions you install yourself keep failing?

Any blocker you can delete is a blocker you will delete, sooner or later. That is not a flaw in your character, it is a flaw in the design: you set the protection up on one of your best days and then run into it on one of your worst. So it ends the way it always ends - the app comes off, or the filtering goes quiet, or a second browser appears - and a few days later you start the whole thing again.

And this is not our reading of these tools. It is what they publish about themselves. BlockerX's own FAQ page walks through turning off the device administrator permission and then deleting the app, and its store description says that deleting it sends a notification to your accountability partner. Which means the strongest thing it holds is a message after the fact, not a way to stop it happening.

The answer is not a tougher app. It is a different arrangement: you lock while your resolve is intact, and you cannot unlock in a weak moment. That is precisely what Tabaa Adults does.

How Tabaa Adults works

• It installs with Device Owner rights, from a computer over the cable or by QR code on a new phone, from the Tabaa Adults install page. Blocking then becomes a policy the operating system enforces itself, not an app watching your screen.
• No supervisor here: in Tabaa Adults you set the rules from inside the app. Anything you make mandatory for a period you set is not lifted before it ends, and the pornography block you cannot lift yourself.
• The modes (Sleep, Study and Strict focus) you set yourself in the app, and nobody grants you an exception from them.
• Enforcement is immediate: a rule you set on yourself applies the moment you save it, on the device itself, with nothing in between.
• Protection does not wait on a connection. The rules live on the device, so they carry on while you are offline, they come back after a restart, and they come back if the system kills the app, because an exact alarm and a background task bring it straight back.
• Tabaa Adults has no supervisor and no removal button while the subscription is running: support alone lifts the protection, remotely and without a factory reset. Once a subscription has ended and the three days of grace are past, the remove-protection button appears for everyone, not only for someone whose free trial ran out.

Your dignity is not the price of protection

An adult asking for protection from himself should not have to pay for it by being watched at everything he writes and reads. So Tabaa Adults was built on a clear rule: blocking is a system policy, not an app reading your screen.

• There is no accessibility service in the app, no notification-listener service, and no VPN service. Nothing on your device reads your conversations or sits in the middle of your connection.
• Tabaa does not ask for your camera, your microphone, your messages, your contacts, your photos or your files.
• Your usage report and your list of apps are yours to read in your own app, and nobody is watching you. No message content. No screenshots.
• And instead of a "no scary permissions" slogan, here is the whole picture: Device Owner is the highest administrative privilege Android grants an app, and the Usage Access permission needs your own hand to grant it. The difference is that what we do take is declared and limited to one purpose, and what we do not take, we do not take at all.
• If your Tabaa Adults subscription ends, three days of grace follow in which nothing changes, then the phone shows a screen with two buttons, renew and remove the protection. Calls, SMS and WhatsApp keep working, and none of your data is wiped. Renewing takes an activation code you buy from the site or from a shop.

Your bank and your everyday apps carry on unchanged

Most blocking apps on Android work through the Accessibility permission: the one that reads everything on your screen and acts on it. It is also the permission that account-stealing malware abuses, which is why some banking and payment apps limit what they will do when they find an app holding it on the phone. In Egypt, the published release notes for the InstaPay app and for the National Bank of Egypt app describe the app behaving differently on devices where "advanced system permissions" have been granted. To be fair about it: this is not a blanket rule across every bank - the Banque Misr app, for one, carries no such note.

Tabaa Adults does not need that permission at all, and it runs no VPN sitting across your connection. Content filtering happens on a completely different level: the phone's Private DNS is pinned to Tabaa's resolver over DNS-over-TLS in the system settings, and then the setting is locked so it cannot be edited. Every query on the device goes through it - the browser, the browser embedded inside another app, the web page that opens inside a game or a chat app, and apps working in the background. No app has to "integrate" with Tabaa to be filtered.

• The filtering is independent of the modes, and underneath it sits a DNS-level pornography floor that never lifts, not even by you.
• Under that, a second layer: 47 VPN, proxy, Tor and DNS-changer apps blocked in every mode and suspended even when they shipped with the phone, with the VPN setting itself locked as well.
• The blocking is bound to the device, not to an account, a network or a SIM: Wi-Fi and mobile data alike, and with any number of Google accounts, because Tabaa never touches your accounts in the first place. Adding a second user, a work profile, cloned apps and the private space in Android 15 are all locked by default, and the second space on Xiaomi phones is an extra Android user, which the add-user lock covers.
• And honestly: Tabaa Adults needs Android 10 or newer, because older versions will not let the Private DNS be pinned and locked. We are not going to tell you that getting around the filtering is "impossible" either - an app carrying its own DNS resolver inside it may route around the path - which is why VPN apps are suspended, browsers that encrypt DNS themselves are blocked, and the VPN setting itself is locked.

The practical upshot for someone who works from his phone: protection at system level, without putting anything on the device that your banking app takes issue with. For the detail, read why blocking DNS and VPNs is not enough.

Tabaa Adults modes

Tabaa Adults has three modes you run yourself: Study, Sleep and Strict focus, and you can add modes of your own. Make a mode mandatory and there is no ending it before its time: you decide while you are calm, and the app carries it out.

• Sleep is a daily window and Study is a session you start yourself, and in each of them only the apps you picked 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 itself pins the screen, the lock carries on through a restart, and it works with no internet because the end time is stored on the device.
• The clock is not a way out: while any mode is active the device clock is pinned to network time, so winding it forward does not jump the window.

Tabaa Adults or Tabaa Children?

And if the problem is on the computer?

Tabaa Desktop for Windows is a separate product with no supervisor: you alone control it.

• Pornography blocking runs from the first install, at DNS level. If the subscription ends, three days of grace follow and then the blocking stops being applied, with nothing deleted: your lists stay saved on your account and come back the moment you renew.
• On top of that you block what you want: sites, programs, folders, paths and browser extensions. Every item carries the commitment you pick: optional, mandatory for a set period, or forever.
• VPN and proxy programs are closed automatically.
• Removing it takes a password you set. If you want the key truly out of your own hand, have someone you trust set it.
• With no internet, all of it carries on unchanged.

What does it cost?

Tabaa Adults is a monthly or yearly subscription for one phone, with a seven-day free trial first. Tabaa Desktop is a separate subscription for one PC. The detail is on the pricing page, and if you get stuck at any step, support on WhatsApp at +201507966165 answers in Arabic.

Read also

• Why is blocking DNS and VPNs not enough?
• What is Device Owner, and why does it stop the blocker being deleted?
• The best Arabic porn-blocking app for adults
• Porn-blocking apps for Arabic speakers, compared