iOS 9 Content Blockers


Dave Mark:

Here's the current list, in alphabetical order:

1Blocker, from Salavat Khanov
Adamant, from Cory Bohon
Blockr, from Tim Poller & Arno Appenzeller
Crystal, from Murphy Apps.
Freedom, from Zach Simone
Hide and Seek by Roopesh Chander < -- Mentioned by @gruber
Peace, by Marco Arment
Purify, from Charismatic
Silentium, from the Silentium team

I guess I haven't been following this, but I didn't realize iOS 9 requires a third-party app to do any content blocking. There's been a lot of discussion of the feature, I guess I sort of assumed it was a built-in feature. Once a blocker is installed as an app, controls become available within Safari's preferences.

What's interesting is multiple content blockers can be installed and active at once. I'll guess it might not be very efficient to have multiple apps trying to perform the same task, but this does open the possibility for customization and specialized features. Perhaps one app does one thing better than the other, for example. The upcoming Hide and Seek app might be a good example of more of a privacy tool for search than content blocker. That app could easily complement other blockers.

I've been playing around with Ghostery in Chrome, so I when I heard Peace uses that as a backend, I pulled the trigger on that purchase.