Marco Arment Pulls 'Peace' iOS Ad Blocker Because It 'Just Doesn't Feel Good'

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Posted September 18, 2015 at 6:16pm by iClarified

Marco Arment, the developer behind Instapaper and former CTO of Tumblr, has announced he is pulling Peace, an iOS 9 ad blocker application which just became the number one paid app on the App Store.

As I write this, Peace has been the number one paid app in the U.S. App Store for about 36 hours. It’s a massive achievement that should be the highlight of my professional career. If Overcast even broke the top 100, I’d be over the moon.

Achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate, but probably should have. Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit.

If you are not aware, Apple has introduced the ability to create content blocking Safari extensions in iOS 9, letting users block ads and cut off funding from websites that they frequent. At the same time, Apple has introduced News, a new application which lets users read articles from their favorite websites alongside iAds. Apple notes that publishers can "earn 100% of the revenue from ads you sell, and 70% when iAd sells ads for you."

At this point, it's still not clear how badly publishers will be affected by the new ad blocking extensions in iOS 9. If you're using an ad blocker we strongly recommend whitelisting respectable sites whose content you appreciate.

You can read Arment's full post at the link below...

Read More [via Randel]

Marco Arment Pulls 'Peace' iOS Ad Blocker Because It 'Just Doesn't Feel Good'

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Za - September 19, 2015 at 8:06pm

Ads have become so intrusive. Reading half a paragraph, and there are 7 ads in the way? How does a content provider allow that? It's ugly. Clearly, their only concern is for money and clicks. If they were worried about anything else, they wouldn't allow ads to dominate their sites. I quit Facebook. There's nothing worth the agony of waiting 20-30 seconds for a half dozen ads to load when someone posts a link to a "story". If there was a way to block ads in the Facebook app, I'd go back. Twitter isn't as bad, but I can see it headed that way. I don't feel bad blocking ads. They tone it down, and worry about the user experience, I'll kill the ad blockers.

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MUKAI - September 19, 2015 at 4:25pm

Why does this crappy app have the Obama symbol? Hmmm.

Whirldy - September 19, 2015 at 10:53am

Refunds pending from Marco?

Ali - September 19, 2015 at 4:50am

He used Ghostery open source material closed it and sell it, which no good that is main reason if he didn't does that then Ghostery will contact Apple to pull it out

Keithk79 - September 19, 2015 at 4:06am

I don't wanna see ads, period. Especially video ads. That uses my bandwidth. Are the ad companies going to start compensating me for how much of bandwidth it's used? We know that's not going to happen.

Chris - September 18, 2015 at 9:20pm

He's doing what the flappy bird guy did. Pull a top app for attention

stevenlacross - September 18, 2015 at 11:51pm

Yeah I agree, also I wish I could block the iClarified apps ads, they are annoying. Why take up the whole screen and make me always click on you because I was about to click something else when the ad poped up. Ugh

odedoo1 - September 19, 2015 at 3:34am

I don't think so he was already number one and making tones f $$$$, I believe that it was just too good for Apple to allow, Any way that's my opinion in the matter.

Ali - September 18, 2015 at 6:29pm

We already blocking ads before using proxy/VPN, do not warry we will get Crystal cheaper and amazing and the list continues so good luck on pulling it lol :)