Post

Replies

Boosts

Views

Activity

Use a HTTP Proxy with WkWebView
Hi,We have a need in our Swift app for using a HTTP proxy with WKWebView. We want to route all HTTP(S) traffic through a proxy running Privoxy, which strips the http(s) traffic of tracking scripts and ads (for HTTPS traffic we obviously cannot see the content and strip the ads, but we can still block the requests going to hostnames that are known for serving ads). That is basically our product to our costumers. Anonymous (through proxy), ad and tracking free browsing, where no one is monitoring what you are buying or browsing with the purpose of profiling you and selling the information about you to others.With the now deprecated UIWebview, we were able to setup a HTTP proxy through the NSUrlProtocol, but since its deprecated now, continouing using it seems like a risky idea in anything but the short term.We have not found any way, by which we can setup a HTTP proxy in the WKWebView, since it seems to be doing the networking out-of-process of the app... Sources like this post on this forum seems to back this up: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/74572.However, Ssome sources seems to indicate that WkWebView was made more user-friendly with IOS 11 and IOS 12 - which is after the above post, so maybe it is possible now. As said, we have tried without luck recently, but maybe we are missing something?We hope someone can help or otherwise just give us some clarity, as the core part of our product depends on this feature, so any help and/or clarity is appreciated.NB:We have considered other options such as using a VPN to send all our data through our own servers. This requires that we change our full infrastructure setup though. And it seems that there is no split-tunneling options in IOS (on non-managed IOS), so if we use the VPN approach, our VPN connection (meant just for some casual browser surfing) will become a general VPN connection on the device. That means we would have to carry the full load of the users' network usage suddenly, which would likely force us to triple our monthly subscription fee to be rentable...Hope to get an answer, and sorry for the slightly long post! (Hopefully it showed we have done our homework and are not asking you to do it for us atleast!).Best,Jonas
13
0
13k
Oct ’18