TunnelVision was built to be shipped. It was finished, submitted, and reviewed. It is not on the App Store, and it is not going to be — for a reason that has nothing to do with the app itself. This page explains exactly what happened, so you can judge the software on its merits rather than on its absence from the store.
Version 1.0 was submitted to App Review and reviewed on 28 August 2026 on an iPhone 17 Pro Max. It was rejected under App Store Review Guideline 5.4 — Legal: VPN Apps. Apple’s finding, in full:
Your VPN app was submitted by an Apple Developer Program account registered to an individual.
All VPN apps must be submitted from an Apple Developer Program account registered to a company or organization.
That is the entire objection. There was no finding about privacy, data handling, functionality, crashes, design, metadata, or the app’s behaviour on device. The rejection is about who holds the developer account, not about what the software does.
Guideline 5.4 governs “VPN apps”. In practice Apple applies it to any app that ships a
NEPacketTunnelProvider — the NetworkExtension class that receives the device’s raw IP
packets. TunnelVision ships one, because on iOS that class is the only supported way for an
app to see the traffic leaving the device. There is no alternative API. Capturing packets on
an unmodified iPhone means being, in Apple’s classification, a VPN app.
This is worth stating plainly, because TunnelVision is not a VPN in the sense the guideline was written for. It sells no VPN service, has no subscription, and operates no infrastructure:
Guideline 5.4 exists to make VPN operators accountable — a VPN carries other people’s traffic to a company’s servers, and Apple wants a legal entity behind that. It is a reasonable rule for the apps it was written for. TunnelVision carries traffic exactly nowhere, and still falls inside the category, because the category is defined by the API rather than by where the traffic goes.
Two obvious remedies do not apply.
Transferring the app to an organization account. Apple’s rejection notice suggests app transfer. App transfer requires the app to have had at least one version released on the App Store. TunnelVision never shipped, so there is nothing to transfer. That route is closed by the same rejection that recommends it.
Re-registering as an organization. Converting an Apple Developer Program membership from individual to organization requires a legal entity — one that can sign contracts with Apple. Apple does not accept sole proprietors, trade names, or DBAs for this, and issues a D-U-N-S requirement on top. Incorporating a company, and carrying its running costs indefinitely, in order to give away a free developer tool is not a trade worth making.
So the app is here instead, with its source, under the MIT licence. If you want it, you can
build it and run it on your own phone. That takes a paid Apple Developer account of your own —
see BUILDING.md — which is the same barrier, moved to where at least it buys
you the source code as well.
It says nothing about the app’s quality or its privacy properties. Those claims are checkable here in a way an App Store listing never allowed: the capture path, the storage, the TLS handling, and the complete absence of any network client that talks to a server of ours are all in this repository, and you can read them.
The design constraints that would have applied on the App Store still hold in the source, because they were never store-driven in the first place:
decisions/0003-no-third-party-pinning-bypass.md.There is no plan to work around the guideline. Specifically:
If you maintain an organization Developer account and think this belongs on the store, the licence permits it. Do it under your own name and your own accountability — not as a re-upload of someone else’s identity.