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Comment by lstamour | Hacker News Reader

Just bought and tried (in this order): Crystal, Purify and Peace. Each has features to like. Crystal has a great price and is the only one to let you report an ad not blocked or broken page so that the ad block list can be updated. Purify lets you block scripts and images on top of font-blocking options also in Peace. Crystal missed an ad that Purify (and Peace) caught, but Peace was the only one that seriously removed all the cruft causing slowdowns, even Google+ news site pop ups and like button pinned banners from The Verge in addition to blocking ads. So my recommendations are Crystal for price, Peace for well, exactly what it says on the tin, and Purify if you'd like to block images and scripts also. Check screenshots of each for the latest on their preference panels.

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Keep in mind that there will be zillions of these in short order and many will also be free. Since they all use the same Apple-provided matching/blocking engine, there isn't going to be much in the way of innovation there - there won't be a content blocker that is 3 times faster and uses a quarter of the memory of some other content blocker.

It'll be down to config UI and the quality of their rules - the rules are all going to be derived from publicly available rule lists. There will very likely be publicly available lists in Apple's format quite soon as well.

Marco Ament comes out looking best on the last point by being completely upfront about where the rules in his blocker come from.

I would add to that responsiveness in updating rulesets, ability to add your own rules (especially graphical) or customize rule sets by country, and security features like noscript or phishing warnings as possible ways others could stand out in future. We might end up seeing special purpose Content Blockers, site-specific ones...

It will be interesting to see if Adblock Fast can be faster. It says it only uses 7 "rules", that I think someone said must be machine compiled, and it's arriving today on iOS9 as well. It may not have a great database, though.

https://www.producthunt.com/tech/adblock-fast

Those '7 rules' are a giant OR concatenation of a zillion rules, lifted from somewhere else (i.e. the usual publicly available sources.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192391

It's not going to be any faster or slower than any other blocker using a similar number of conditions.

I guess that a fart app should probably not cost anything since it's quite useless, but I do believe that it's a problem that on day one of a whole new App Store category, the first app launched, Crystal (it appeared hours before Purify and Peace for me anyways) is a free app. That's how you make mobile apps an unsustainable business.

I don't know how much work has gone into making these content blocker apps, but I bet it has taken some time - time that in any "normal" business would be charged for, and I think mobile apps creators should charge more for their apps too. In my experience, there are two types of mobile apps consumers. Those that won't pay for an app, whether it costs $1, $10 or $20, and those that will, and I think it would be healthier for the ecosystem to cater at least as much to the latter group as the former, but I don't think that's currently the case.

It's a race to the bottom, folks.

You assume that every app developer is out to make money. This is not more true than that every PC application developer is out to make money. Some people make free software and gives it away for free. That's not a race to the bottom, unless you think Linux being free is a race to the bottom against Windows.

For some reason AppStore has surprisingly low amount of free software. It's either free with ads, free with in-app purchases or paid. Or free software missing marketing and it's hard to find it in AppStore or popular ratings.

Is there some compilation of free software links?

It costs money to join the Apple Developer Program so it's probably in peoples' minds to at least recoup that.

App developers should just go on tour - that's where they make most of their money anyways, right? Or maybe sell some T-shirts...

Meanwhile in another part of the world, a dazzling array of free software if available - just check repos like github et al. It might be a race, but it does not seem to head for the bottom. It has long since passed the apple-world in market penetration.

Money is only one of the motivators for writing software. It might be the prime motivator in the apple world (producers and consumers alike) but it by no means the only one.

Only one of these apps is free - Crystal. And it says it's temporary right on the App Store page and why. The author is making an entirely conscious, clear-eyed business decision. Here's a bit from the email he sent to his testers:

A big thank you to all 1200 of the testers who have helped shape Crystal into a solid application. I'm sorry to everyone else who didn't get a spot to test it, but the good news is, you can try it now for free!

Why Free? I want everyone to experience Crystal for themselves so as a thank you to my early adopters, I've decided to make it free for a very limited time.

Whats the catch? No catch, but I would like to request you help me out with Rating, Sharing, a quick survey or donating a little money below, I do have a wife & 2 kids to feed

Perhaps there's a race to the bottom in mobile apps but it probably produces more useful things than the race to tut-tut the decisions or generosity of others.

And an hour later, it's $0.99. I don't have any money left in my account so I'm just going to wait until there is a free one.

That's just on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10231933

so you won't have to wait terribly long. And there are already a few that have IAP but basic functionality is free.

Does iTunes not require a credit card on file?

It does not. People typically just use an iTunes gift card in order to limit possible damage.

I don't think 'no cc on file' is 'typical' behaviour, but it is an option.

I should clarify: Among people that don't use credit cards like kids or the paranoid, the typical solution is to use a gift card. I, personally, do not like to use credit cards for purchases less than 40$. I certainly didn't think my comment was worthy of downvoting, especially since the comment I replied to asked if it was required.

I don't down vote, because down voting on HN is fundamentally broken.

I would have thought nowadays with Family Sharing accounts, kids accounts were less likely to need gift cards.

I dunno. On other platforms (Windows, OSX, Android, etc) ad blockers are just free browser plugins. While I'm sure there's a place for paid options on platforms where devs have the ability to differentiate with some "killer feature", it seems like the iOS options are the equivalent of the different AdBlock variants (Plus/Edge/Origin/et al).

I feel like in the case of an adblocker, there's precedent for that to be free. They're freely available -and- more powerful on the desktop, so why should anyone pay for a less powerful, but still useful version on their phone/tablet? That's just silly

You know these apps rely on very very long lists of domains to be blocked that lots of people have gathered during the course of years and that the developers of those adblocker apps just took those lists for free? So that's what those apps should cost.

That's incorrect. Peace for example negotiated a contract with it's rule list provider (Ghostery) to share profits. So this will help Ghostery to maintain a quality list. I'm not sure that the other blockers haven't negotiated similar arrangements. Unattributed accusations of leeching aren't very kind.

I do not think it is a problem that some people are not willing to charge something that you want to charge for.

That is, for you to be profitable, you rely on someone else not doing something.

That is the nature of competition.

It's a race to the bottom, folks, if your only barometer is money.

That said, none are perfect. Swapping between all three and reloading Slate.com, it seemed impossible to block an after-page-load ad inserted at the top of the article via JS.

Except when I ran Purify with Scripts disabled on Slate, then the page loaded instantly with no ad for obvious reasons. (Sadly Purify is missing an extension to selectively enable JS.)

Searching the store, Blockr looks nice enough, specifically calling out blocking of Cookie Warnings, but other than that, seems like a more configurable Crystal with features of Peace.

1Blocker which I have yet to use, currently takes the cake on configurability -- perhaps too much so -- it lets you turn on and off individual rules as well as add your own by typing in the filter directly.

I don't mind most ads, but I'd happily pay just to block EU cookie warnings (with a good UX).

I guess the easiest way to do that would be to collect the "EU cookie warning seen"-cookies.

Can't one keep more than a single blocker active at the same time?

Yes, I ultimately don't want to though for both performance and debugging purposes. If something goes wrong, I'd rather easily know who did it. But yes, I would prefer if say, a "no script" content blocker specifically focused on that, an "ad block" one on that, a "privacy" one too... You could also combine apps to block regional ad variants, maybe, if in future country-specific ones are developed. Running more than one might work best for something like 1Blocker as a way to add your own block rules...

In Setting ->Safari -> Content Blocker,

You can Enable/Disable each one, so you may enable all at the same time

You can enable more than one blocker at a time.

Cool technology, but I don't understand why every tiny little feature or program costs money on mobile. The price of convenience?

Because software developers are people who like to eat too?

Like all the small publishers that get ruined by adblocking?

You're comparing privacy invading, intrusive, battery draining, data chewing ad-networks, with a developer who asks you to pay a couple of bucks for something he's probably spent a month minimum developing.

Sorry, but no.

Those publishers have the option of asking their readers to pay for the content directly, which is exactly what the developer does.

They also have the option to use ad networks that aren't completely user-hostile.

I don't understand when I hire a painter that they ask for money either :/

The prices are usually tiny as well. Peace is $2.99.

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