Recent changes to Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in iOS may have killed burner wallets for iPhone users.

Burner wallets are non-custodial wallets that store a user'south private key in the browser's local storage. A change made by Apple tree to Safari's Webkit engine meant to enhance user privacy may jeopardize this model.

This alter will cap "the expiry of customer-side cookies to seven days". This implies that burner wallets will be destroyed after that short menses. Although burner wallets were never intended for long-term storage of cryptocurrency, some users cull not to follow this rule.

Exception to the rule

Fortunately, in that location is ane exception to this alter — adding an app to the home screen. The blog post announcing the alter states:

"The vii-day cap on script-writable storage is gated on 'after seven days of Safari utilize without user interaction on the site'. That is the case in Safari. Spider web applications added to the home screen are non part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of employ. Their days of use will match actual use of the web application which resets the timer. We practice non expect the showtime-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted."

Unfortunately, adding a burner wallet to the dwelling screen is no easy task. Former Google software engineer David Mihal wrote a weblog examining the changes, and noted:

"Unfortunately, there'southward no 'easy' style to prompt a user to add a website to their home screen, users must notice the button hidden inside Safari's 'share' panel. Time to come Burner Wallets will likely display warnings to Safari users, prompting them to add the wallet to the domicile screen & secure their funds."

Dorsum in 2022 at that place were 720 million iPhones in use around the world, it is unknown what percentage of iPhone owners use Safari-based burner wallets.