The people have spoken: mobile ads suck.
On Thursday, apps to block advertising were numbers 1, 3 and 6 on the most downloaded list kept by Apple. The surge came the day after Apple's iOS9 update made it possible for iPhone users to enable them with the Safari browser for the first time.
Newly released apps like Peace, Crystal and Purify have cracked the top ten on the App Store's most-downloaded chart. When enabled in the Settings menu, they shield Safari users from the pop-ups, auto-play videos, trackers and other types of mobile advertising that can weigh down loading speeds and clutter web pages.
The evident appetite for such apps poses a huge problem for websites whose livelihood depends on these sorts of display ads.
Publishers are seeing a growing portion of their web traffic come from smartphones, but mobile ads tend to make much less money than those on desktop. Until now, only desktop browsers had good or reliable capabilities to block ads.
The explosion in popularity of ad blockers has led to a bitter ethics debate between those who see them as an existential threat to the free Internet and those who are sick of barrages of obnoxious — and sometimes harmful — ads and arrays of trackers that trace their online movements to better target ads.
"The success of it is kind of bittersweet because I love the Internet and I love the websites that are on it," said Crystal developer Dean Murphy. "But at the same time, I hate the mobile ads industry...I just find it very intrusive and very hostile."
Peace developer Marco Arment has no such qualms.
"We shouldn’t feel guilty about this," Arment wrote in his blog on Wednesday. "The 'implied contract' theory that we’ve agreed to view ads in exchange for free content is void because we can’t review the terms first — as soon as we follow a link, our browsers load, execute, transfer, and track everything embedded by the publisher."
The fact that ad blocking apps are charging for downloads has also caused controversy.
Murphy said he made the app free for the first 100,000 users, then set it to the cheapest possible price of $.99. The price is meant to cover the costs of developing, hosting and updating the app.
The app was downloaded 115,000 times in the first 12 hours, he said.
Notably absent from the first crop of apps are some of the big names in desktop ad blocking, like Adblock Plus and Adblock, which offers its own iOS browser. This may have to do with the fact that moneymaking features like charging sites to break through blockers and collecting user data aren't available through Safari.
Publishers are likely gearing up to strike back at ad blockers as they have on desktop, wheresoftware allows them to bypass ad blockers or target users with messages.
Here's a closer look at the first batch of blockers to hit the App Store:
Peace, $2.99
Peace developer Arment is best known for creating Instapaper, an app that allowed readers to save articles for offline reading, oftentimes stripping ads in the process.
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For Peace, Arment partnered with ad blocking company Ghostery, which gives the app the advantage of a well-established database to draw from.
On top of blocking ads, Peace lets you disable slow-loading fonts, block social widgets and hide comment sections at the bottom of websites. It also includes a straightforward feature for whitelisting sites.
Purify, $3.99
Beyond blocking ads and tracking scripts, Purify lets you choose to block images and web fonts to further boost loading speeds with a similar whitelisting feature.
Crystal, $.99
Crystal is cheaper and more minimalist than the rest of the crop with straightforward ad blocking and an option to report sites that still show ads so the app can fill out its blacklist.
Blockr, $1.99
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Blockr lets you customize what you block with an option for shutting out media beyond ads, tracking scripts and hiding warnings about site cookies.
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