I haven’t bought Portmaster yet because I am not keen on subscriptions, but I am curious, as I have Little Snitch up and running now…what am I looking for in here? There is a ton of information flooding through the space, and it’s hard to tell what is telemetry vs what is just standard parts of the operating system. I don’t want to accidentally break something and then spend a bunch of time 3 weeks from now when I run into the issue trying to troubleshoot it.
Is there a reason you’re even looking into the connections apps are making? What are you trying to do?
It seems like you’re not sure yourself for what you want so it’s hard to say without more info or context.
These are network monitoring tools to see where the app connects and how many times. It also gives you the ability to block any app from connecting to the internet if you don’t want it to.
Some people like Bazell do have a few safe default recommendation but otherwise it will indeed be very noisy in the first few days.
As for what system parts are essential and not, that’s where companies do not want to make your life easy unfortunately and it’s on you to figure it out by yourself with trial and error unfortunately.
I mean, it also depends on how many features from Apple you want to use.
I do not care about any of those, hence just use the things I install/visit.
But if you want to (for example) use the official Mail, then good luck figuring out what needs to be allowed indeed…
Have not used Portmaster in a while but at least for Little Snitch you can use blocklists so that can already filter a lot of the requests that you probably want to block and saves you from having too much manual work.
