My understanding is that this domain is some sort of 'trick' that Apple uses when connected to a public wifi hotspot - so why am I seeing queries every. single. minute in my pi-hole logs? Everything is connected directly to my openwrt router using WPA2/3 and passwords. The openwrt router is connected to my RV park wifi, also using ID and passwords. So why the queries?
That's the usual captive portal detection of mobil devices ... apple uses captive.apple.com, google uses connectivitycheck.android.com/generate_204 and microsoft uses www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt.
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It should be normal as it works in a similar way on Linux.
It helps the system and applications identify connectivity status.
That is how the "No Internet" warning on the iPhone's status bar is triggered. If an attempt to reach the Apple server fails entirely, the wifi connection is assumed to be broken and unusable since there is no path to the Internet.
If it returns a different page than expected, it's a captive portal and the captive portal login process is launched.
There is the "fakeinternet" package which answers these queries locally rather than actually passing to the Internet. If you were in a situation where wifi is not connected to the Internet, or you're paying a very high price per byte for the Internet connection, that could be useful.
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