Cant get an iphone app to work

[allebone]

Hi,

Not very important but been looking into this for like a week on and off, and cant work out why a specific iphone app does not work.

My kids play a game called zombs royale which you can download on the app store.
If I try using the app on cellular it works fine, but behind opnsense it gets stuck on 20% when you open it.
I have checked a bazillion times nothing is blocking it on the firewall, that I can see and wondered if anyone else has a similar issue with this 1 specific app.

I did try zombs royale in a web browser (they have a browser version) and that works fine, so its exclusive to the app store version. This same behavior can be tested across multiple ios devices, all experience the same issue, but on cellular no problem.

Anyone else able to confirm a similar problem? Its only a game for my kids but puzzling why it does not work.

kind regards
Pete

[klamath]

Could it be DNS blackhole?  Can you set static IP on phone and use upstream DNS?

[packet loss]

I'm curious are you using dhcp reservations for static IP's on your network? MAC address associated with specific IP. That's how I have my network / wireless setup also denying unknown clients. I noticed not too long ago one of my family members upgraded their Iphone to the newest IOS version which added a new "security feature" which randomizes the MAC address of an IOS device by default. My family member had no idea she wasn't connecting to our network. I had to turn off the random MAC address feature on the Iphone so it would properly connect to our network. Curious to know if this might have an impact on what you are experiencing. Maybe the Apple products devices are connecting to your network on a different IP that because of the random MAC.

Also I've used unbound to block ads, specific websites etc which has caused issues on a couple of website I visit on a regular basis. For example one webpage would not show a live chat feature because of one of the entires I had in one of my blocklists. Maybe?

Just a shot in the dark.

[allebone]

It does seem like an apple feature but I cant work out what it is. Did either of you manage to test this specific app and did it work for you? Would be helpful to know of it is just me its broken for. I did check my dns server and the private IP thing but I onow apple made other changes under the hood.

[allebone]

You guys gave me a good idea to check. You were correct about DNS. Actually a little while ago I changed my dns server on my firewall to 1.1.1.2 - described as ‘ Malware Blocking Only
Primary DNS: 1.1.1.2 (cloudflare)’. As opposed to 1.1.1.1.

For some reason this app is considered malware by cloudflare dns? Strange. Obviously I didnt see any issue anywhere because the dns filter is upstream when using cloudflare dns. Not sure what to think. It seemed like just a kids game but they must have detected malware from it?

Thanks for the idea. This was the right track.

Pete