iOS 9 To Have Ad Blocking Capabilities

An anonymous reader writes: iOS 9 will reportedly carry ad blocking capabilities for it's Safari browser when it is released later this year. The feature wasn't rolled out with the usual fanfare one might expect, and flew under the radar. ZDNet reports: "It's not immediately clear why the new ad-blocking privacy feature was included in iOS 9, due out later this year. After all, the iPhone and iPad maker has its own advertising network -- even if its success was limited (which is putting it nicely). What's clear is that allowing ad-blockers in iOS 9 could deliver a serious blow to Google, the biggest rival to Apple in the mobile space, because advertising remains a massive portion of the search giant's income."

Comments

Antitrust

[mjm1231]

There have been antitrust allegations around Apple's new streaming music service. This seems to me to be just another way to prevent the competition from actually competing.

People used to scream holy hell when MS did this kind of shit, but Apple is just as bad and in many cases much worse. I guess they saw that Microsoft got off with a little wrist slap so why not use borderline illegal (or blatantly illegal, once in a while) anticompetitive tactics.

Re:iOS is the majority of Google's mobile revenue

[AmiMoJo]

An external company estimated that they make 75% of their mobile ad revenue from iOS. They don't actually know, it's just a guess.

In the mean time, the Play store did $10bn of app sales. iOS is still doing better, but it's not like Google is starved for cash or not making anything out of Android. And in any case, their primary goal is to make sure there is a good, open mobile OS that isn't a walled garden.

Pro-Apple articles love to make out that Android is failing and Apple is winning hard. 50% of all computers (if you consider smart phones and tablets to be computers) shipped last year ran Android. It's right in the article you linked to. Google doesn't care about OS version fragmentation, because it isn't a huge problem for it. We don't see hundreds of millions of zombie botnet phones due to the allegedly massive security flaws in older versions. Sites like the NY Times are just hyping up bullshit spouted by "analysts" who are trying to look like they have some insight, just to make a story.

Apple won't screw Google, because it needs Google. Who else are they going to use for the default search provider, Bing? Yahoo perhaps? Apple Maps is right at the top of the tech fuck-ups scale, Apple isn't going to make that mistake again.