Why we built Guard instead of copying Hiya

The call blocker isn't the privacy tool you think it is

Hiya built its reputation on something tangible: it blocks unwanted calls and texts. That's real value. I use it myself on a shared family device. But when a customer asked me whether Hiya could audit the permissions on their banking app or news reader, I realised the confusion runs deep.

Hiya is a gatekeeper. It decides whether a caller gets through. Guard does something else entirely. It shows you what your existing apps are already permitted to access. The Spotify app on your phone right now. The weather app. The messaging app your teenager uses. Hiya won't tell you that Spotify has permission to your location, your contacts, your clipboard. It only cares about incoming phone numbers.

That's not a criticism of Hiya. It's just a different job. But I kept seeing the same pattern in early user feedback for Guard: people were treating permissions as something vague and distant. They knew apps collected data. They didn't know their Maps app had permission to their full contact list, or that their weather app could access the clipboard every time they paste something.

The moment we realised what we were actually building

I'll never forget the launch week of Guard. We'd built the Free dashboard with 12 common apps and a privacy risk score. Nothing fancy. Just education. A user came back with a message saying she'd opened the app, looked at her TikTok permissions (location, contacts, calendar, camera, microphone, photo library), saw the risk score, and immediately went into iOS Settings to revoke three of them. Took her about ninety seconds.

That was the moment I understood Guard wasn't competing with Hiya or any call-blocking app. We were building for people who wanted to see their own exposure and act on it immediately. The deep-link straight to Settings was the key. Anyone can tell you an app has too many permissions. Guard lets you fix it in one tap.

What Hiya does brilliantly (blocking spam) requires legal access to phone metadata and carrier relationships. What Guard does (showing app permissions) uses only what iOS already shows you in Settings, but in a format that makes sense. You see the risk. You see which apps are the problem. You revoke what you don't want. No legal grey area. No guesswork.

Permission fatigue is real; so is the gap in solutions

Most iPhone users never go into Settings to check permissions. They tap 'Allow' on the first prompt and move on. Then they wonder why their battery dies or their data limit keeps getting hit.

Hiya doesn't solve that because it has no visibility into app permissions. It's not a flaw in their product. It's just not what they set out to do. They wanted to stop spam calls. They nailed it.

But there's a massive gap between 'blocked spam calls' and 'I understand what my apps can access.' That gap is where Guard lives. When I built the Personal Pro tier, I added real-time alerts on permission changes because I learned that people install an update and suddenly an old app has new permissions. The clipboard check came from watching someone realise their note-taking app was reading their clipboard history.

For parents, the Family tier bridges another gap. You can set up a six-device family hub and actually see what permissions your kids' apps have requested. Not through some murky third-party tool that might be overstating what it can do. Through a clear view of the curated demo apps and the iOS Settings integration that actually matters.

What Guard is not (and why honesty matters)

I want to be clear about what we're not doing, because I see a lot of privacy tools make claims they can't keep.

Guard doesn't scan your phone's file system. iOS sandboxing prevents that. We can't tell you what actual permissions an app is using right now, in real time. What we can do is show you what you've granted, what the demos show, and walk you to the place where you control it. That's the honest version.

We're not an antivirus. We don't check for malware. We're not a VPN. We don't encrypt your traffic or hide your location from ISPs. We don't monitor your microphone or camera; iOS doesn't expose that data to third-party apps, so anyone claiming they can is misleading you.

What we do is educate and connect you directly to the settings that matter. That's it. It's not sexy. But it works, and it's something you can actually verify yourself by opening iOS Settings and checking what we've shown you.

The question that keeps me honest

I could have called Guard a 'comprehensive privacy suite' and loaded it with features that sound powerful but don't do much. Instead, we focused on one question: can the user see their exposure and act on it in under two minutes?

For the Free dashboard, the answer is yes. Twelve common apps, a risk score, a direct link to revoke. For Personal Pro, we added the alerts and the tracking breakdown because power users asked for it. For Family, we added multi-device support because parents need to manage their whole household.

Hiya focuses on a different question entirely: can we stop unwanted calls? They answer that better than anyone. We're answering a question about the apps you've already chosen to install.