Not A Browser vs Anti Browser

25 August 2026 · facts checked against public sources on that date

This is the comparison people actually want, and the honest version of it is short: these are the same idea, and they run on different phones. If you have an iPhone, stop reading and get Anti Browser. If you have an Android, it does not exist for you.

The rest of this page is for people who want to know why that is, and what the smaller differences are.

Anti Browser got here first

Worth saying plainly, because comparison pages written by one competitor about another usually will not.

Anti Browser established this category. Its own description, the browser that prevents browsing, is a better one-line summary of the idea than anything we have written, and the app is well made. It ships a lockdown guide inside the app, which is where we got the idea that the guide should be a real part of the product rather than a support article.

The scoping document for Not A Browser treats Anti Browser as proof the concept can ship at all, which is a genuinely useful thing for a competitor to have proved.

The one real difference: reference tools

Anti Browser includes a small lookup surface: Wikipedia search and on-device AI summaries, presented as reference tools. Not A Browser has nothing of the kind.

It would be easy to frame that as us being more disciplined. It probably is not, and the reason is interesting.

Apple grants default-browser status through a managed entitlement, which means you ask Apple for it and Apple decides. Its published criteria require that the app provide, on launch, one of: a text field for entering a URL, search tools for finding relevant links, or curated lists of bookmarks. A link-only browser removes all three deliberately.

Read against those criteria, a built-in Wikipedia-and-AI lookup stops looking like a feature and starts looking like the thing that makes the entitlement grantable at all.

We cannot confirm that from outside, and it is inference rather than fact. But it is the most plausible explanation for why an app whose entire premise is no search ships a way to search, and it means "we cut search" and "we are a default browser on iOS" may not be simultaneously satisfiable for anybody.

Android has no equivalent gate. Any app can request the default browser role and the user grants it through a normal system dialogue, with no review, no criteria and no requirement to include a search box. That is why Not A Browser can be absolute about this and Anti Browser possibly cannot.

Price

Anti Browser is a paid app, around $14.99 a year, or about $34.99 for lifetime access. Not A Browser gives you seven days free with no payment details. After that, it is US$20 a year, with Google Play setting regional prices. You choose whether to subscribe when the free week ends.

Not A Browser has no servers or accounts, so there is little ongoing infrastructure to fund. Anti Browser's lifetime option is the cheaper long-term choice for someone who already knows the approach works for them.

Google sign-in

Google sign-in currently works in Not A Browser. The app watches for Google's refusal message, so a genuine block produces a readable explanation rather than a dead end.

Anti Browser runs on a different platform and a different engine, and we have not put it through the same test, so treat its behaviour here as unknown rather than as matching ours.

Email-and-password logins work. Magic links work. Banking works. But if a site's only way in is Google, that one task needs a full browser. Any app in this category claiming otherwise has disguised itself as a stock browser to slip past a security control, which is worth knowing before you trust it with a login.