The best Arabic-language porn blocker for adults

Why parental control tools do not fit an adult

Most of the well-known blockers are built around a parent-and-child relationship. Google Family Link, for instance, is free and excellent for children's accounts, but supervision there hangs on a Google account rather than on the device, and Google itself says on its FAQ page that Family Link "does not block inappropriate content, but the settings within it give you filtering options", and that these filters "are not perfect, so explicit or graphic content sometimes gets through". It describes the scope of that filtering as Google's own apps, such as Search, Chrome and YouTube.

An adult's problem is a completely different one. You are the owner of the device, and in a moment of weakness you can delete any protection you installed yourself. So any serious solution for adults has to answer a single question: who is holding the key to the blocking? If the answer is "I am", the solution will collapse the first time it is tested. We have a detailed comparison in Tabaa or Google Family Link, and a full guide to parental controls in Egypt if protecting your children is what you are after.

What makes Tabaa fit an adult in particular?

• The accountability model: you choose a supervisor you trust, a friend or a relative, who holds the key to the blocking from the supervisor app, so you cannot lift the protection yourself whatever the motive. The steps are set out in full in how to get a friend to supervise your phone.
• Device Owner privilege: the highest administrative privilege in Android. A disallowed app is suspended at system level rather than by an app watching the screen, and the "force stop" and "clear data" buttons disappear from Tabaa's own entry in settings. The full explanation is in the What is Device Owner guide.
• No Accessibility permission and no VPN on the phone: Tabaa asks for no camera, no microphone, no SMS, no contacts, no photos and no files, and it does not read your notifications.
• The blocking works while you are cut off from the internet, comes back after the phone reboots, and resumes if the system kills the app: an exact alarm and a background task bring it back.
• Speed: a blocked app closes within about a third of a second, and any change the supervisor makes reaches the phone in about 3 seconds, and instantly when the push message arrives.
• Fully in Arabic: the interface, the reports and the support, with a team that answers in Arabic on WhatsApp.
• The "make us the supervisor" service for anyone with nobody to trust: the Tabaa team takes on the supervision on their behalf.
• Phone and computer both covered: Tabaa for Windows works on the same logic, with personal plans an adult imposes on himself.

Why the absence of the Accessibility permission matters to an adult

Most Android blockers work through the Accessibility permission: the one that lets an app read everything on your screen and interact with it. The problem is that this is precisely the permission that bank-account-stealing software abuses, so some banking and payment apps limit what they do, or refuse to run at all, when they find an app holding it. In Egypt, the published release notes for the InstaPay app and for the National Bank of Egypt app talk about the app behaving differently on devices that have "advanced system permissions" granted. And this is not a blanket rule across every bank: the Banque Misr app, for one, carries no such note.

Tabaa does not need that permission at all. There is no Accessibility service in the app, no notification-reader service and no VPN service, because the blocking is a policy the operating system enforces with Device Owner privilege. The practical result for an adult who runs his life from his phone: protection at system level, without putting anything on your device that banking apps would object to.

Pornography filtering that does not stop

Tabaa pins the phone's private DNS (over DNS-over-TLS) to the Tabaa resolver at system level, and locks that setting so it cannot be edited. Which means every DNS query on the device passes through it: the browser, the browser embedded inside another app, the web page that opens inside a game or a chat app, and every app running in the background. No app has to "integrate" with Tabaa in order to be filtered.

• This filtering is independent of the modes: no mode lifts it, and there is a floor of 118 domains that no supervisor can lift.
• And it keeps running if the subscription expires: the device moves to a read-only default state with the core locks, and is neither unlinked nor locked.
• Underneath it sits a second layer: 47 VPN, proxy, Tor and DNS-changer apps blocked in every mode, suspended even when they shipped preinstalled with the device, with the VPN setting itself locked.
• The default lists are ready from day one: 32 phone apps blocked by default, 11 of them unofficial forks of Telegram, because blocking the official app alone means nothing if a fork gets through.

And the whole picture: this filtering needs Android 9 or newer, because there is no private DNS setting in the system before that. We are not going to tell you that getting past it is "impossible" - an app carrying an encrypted DNS resolver inside itself can step off the path, which is exactly why the list of 47 apps and the lock on the VPN setting sit underneath it. Read why DNS and VPN blocking are not enough if you want the detail.

The four modes: what opens, and when?

The phone has four modes in a fixed order of priority: strict lock, then Sleep, then Study and focus, then Normal. Where two of them overlap, the stronger one is the one that applies.

• Sleep and Study: two daily windows, and in each of them the apps the supervisor chose for that window are the only ones that open.
• Strict lock: a full-screen countdown for a set length of time, during which nothing at all opens, not even calls. The system itself pins the screen, the lock resumes after a reboot, and it works with no internet because its end time is stored on the device.
• And the clock is not a loophole: for as long as a mode is running, the device clock is pinned to network time, so moving the clock forward does not jump the window.

No second space and no second account escapes the block

Blocking in Tabaa is bound to the device itself, not to an account, a network or a SIM. That is why it works on any launcher, with any user of the phone, on Wi-Fi and mobile data equally, and whether or not a Google account is signed in.

• Adding a second user, switching between users, the work profile, and cloned apps and private space on Android 15, are all locked by default. Second space on Xiaomi devices is really an additional Android user underneath, so the lock on adding users covers it on every version.
• Tabaa does not touch your accounts: sign in with as many Google accounts as you like. The protection is bound to the device rather than to the account, and adding one or switching one changes nothing. By comparison, Google states plainly that if you add other personal profiles to the device then "your child's Family Link settings will not apply to those profiles".
• The app updates itself on the phone with no step from you and without going through a store, so any improvement to the protection reaches every device as quickly as a settings change.
• And removal? Possible, through a factory reset whose key is with the supervisor. We deliberately left restoration from recovery mode available so that a device can never be locked away from its owner for good.

And if the problem is on the computer?

Tabaa for Windows is not a scaled-down copy of the phone app. Some of it is built specifically for an adult supervising himself:

• Personal plans you write for yourself: blocked programs, a daily minute budget for each program, and your own schedule. And if you have a supervisor, your plan adds on top of his rules and lifts nothing from them: the schedules merge together, and the lower time cap is the one that wins.
• You can lock your plan behind a passphrase you impose on yourself, and stronger still, the supervisor can set your plan's passphrase from his own app, so you cannot unlock it yourself. The passphrase becomes a fingerprint on your device and is never stored with us. And let us be straight: that lock is deliberate friction to break the impulse, not a defence against a determined machine administrator.
• Pomodoro focus sessions: during the work interval the plan you chose is enforced even if it is switched off for the rest of the day, and during the break a full-screen page appears on every monitor. The counter runs on a clock that can be trusted.
• The clock is not a loophole here either: time only moves forward and is referenced to our server's time, so moving the machine's clock forward buys no extra minutes, and putting it back does not return a day whose limit you have already spent.
• Blocking part of a site without blocking the whole site: YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, for instance, and even when the player is embedded inside another page. That is something DNS filtering can never do.
• Removal requires the supervisor's password, verified against the server at the moment of removal itself, and again if anyone tries to install over the locked copy. Every attempt with a wrong password is reported to the supervisor.
• With no internet everything keeps working: blocked programs stay blocked, and the time limits keep counting. The connection is how changes arrive, not a condition for the rules to apply.

And the Windows default lists are ready from first run: 44 programs blocked by default, 13 of them Android emulators, along with more than a hundred VPN and proxy browser extensions blocked from installing. The detail is on the Tabaa for Windows page.

How does Tabaa stand against the known alternatives?

There is no one solution that is right for everybody, and every alternative has a genuine strength worth naming. The table below is an honest summary of the core differences, and everything in it about the alternatives is taken from their own published words:

One last point that concerns your privacy: on its Data safety card on Google Play, BlockerX declares that it may share personal information, app information and device identifiers with third parties, and that it may collect personal and financial information. Tabaa, by contrast, asks for no camera, no microphone, no SMS, no contacts, no photos and no files.

If you want more detail, we have a full comparison of Arabic and foreign porn blockers, and head-to-head comparisons with Ever Accountable and with BlockerX. And if you are the adult looking for an arrangement that gets the key out of your own hands, start from the adults page.

What does it cost, and how do I start?

The phone subscription is 200 EGP a month or 2,000 EGP a year per device, and the desktop is 100 EGP a month or 1,000 EGP a year. If you have more than one phone, the second device is 150 EGP a month and the third and beyond 100 EGP a month. Payment is electronic, by card and wallet through an Egyptian payment gateway, and discount coupons are available. The detail is on the pricing page.

Start from the install page: the phone is provisioned with Device Owner privilege from a QR code, on a new device or after a factory reset. If your phone has your data on it, read the backup before installing guide first so that you lose nothing. And if you get stuck on any step, support on WhatsApp +201507966165 answers in Arabic.