Once upon a time, developing for Apple was an exciting, rewarding challenge. But lately, that relationship has soured.
Apple has transformed into a trillion-dollar giant that sees developers not as partners, but as a resource to control, extract from, and when convenient ignore.
As an ad blocker developer, I often question if it s wrong to block advertising. What ads should be blocked? What ads shouldn t be blocked? If you use a service or view a website, when is it ok to block their ads and when isn't it?
To answer this, I think the question should first be:
As an indie software business, we're constantly faced with a tough question: Do you double down on what s working? Or hedge your bets and build something new?
The past year at Magic Lasso Adblock, we asked ourselves that very question.
Most apps don t make money from subscriptions. They make money from you. Your data browsing history, app usage, personal behaviour is worth cold, hard cash.
We ran the numbers for our app, Magic Lasso Adblock, and here s what we found:
Current Subscription revenue per user: $25.50/year
Potential Data broker revenue per user: $30+/year
Meaning: we could more than double our profit margins overnight by selling user data.
Magic Lasso Adblock v5.1 now blocks ads and trackers on your Apple TV, enabling you to watch your favourite tv shows with less interruptions while protecting your privacy from in-app ad tracking.
This release builds upon our iPhone, iPad and Mac apps, to work seamlessly on your Apple TV, extending protection to streaming video, games, and news apps.
All ad blocking is done directly on-device, using a fast, efficient Swift-based architecture that follows our strict zero data collection policy.