Ad Blocking Apps Sit At Top Of App Store After iOS 9 Launch

Yesterday, Apple released its latest update, iOS 9, which brings with it new ad blocking capabilities.

And just a day after its release, a third party ad blocking app for Safari is sitting at the top of the App Store listings.

The app is called Peace, and was created by Marco Arment, the former CTO of Tumblr and creator of Instapaper.

The app, which costs $2.99, shot to the top of Apple’s Top Charts for Paid apps in the US, hours after the launch of iOS 9.

Peace is also currently sitting at the top of the chart in the UK App Store, with another ad blocker called Purify at number six.

After you download the blocker, you go into Settings, then Safari and install the ad blocker in Content Blockers.

The app will only block adverts in Safari, not other browsers like Chrome, or on apps like Facebook or Twitter.

Speaking about the ad blocker, and why he created it, Arment said: “Web advertising and behavioral tracking are out of control. They’re unacceptably creepy, bloated, annoying, and insecure, and they’re getting worse at an alarming pace.

“Ad and tracker abuse is much worse on mobile: ads are much larger and harder to dismiss, trackers are harder to detect, their JavaScript slows down page-loads and burns battery power, and their bloat wastes tons of cellular data. And ads are increasingly used as vectors for malware, exploits, and fraud.

“Publishers won’t solve this problem: they cannot consistently enforce standards of decency and security on the ad networks that they embed in their sites. Just as browsers added pop-up blockers to protect us from that abusive annoyance, new browser-level countermeasures are needed to protect us from today’s web abuses.

“If publishers want to offer free content funded by advertising, the burden is on them to choose ad content and methods that their readers will tolerate and respond to.”

And the early signs show that mobile ad blockers are proving very popular with users, which will concern publishers, many of whom make a huge amount of revenue from online ads.

A recent report by PageFair and Adobe said that there are currently 198m monthly active users of ad blocking software worldwide, and this number has risen by a massive 41% over the last 12 months.

And despite this, although mobile accounted for 38% of all web browsing in Q2 2015, only 1.6% of ad block traffic was from mobile devices.

While Android has ad blocking capabilities, this is the first major move towards seeing ad blocking on iOS, and many estimate it will spark a revolution regarding mobile ad blocking software, meaning many publishers and advertisers will have to change their tact, and come up with more user-friendly ways to advertise.