Marco Arment pulls ad-blocking app Peace, the top paid app for 36 hours, citing the unfairness of indiscriminate ad blocking
Just doesn't feel good — I've pulled Peace from the App Store. I'm sorry to all of my fans and customers who bought this on my name, expecting it to be supported for longer than two days.
Context & Ripple Effects
Peace went from launch to collapse in under a week: Arment shipped it on September 17 as a $2.99 content blocker built on Ghostery's tracker database for iOS 9, it hit the top of the paid charts within 36 hours, and he pulled it the next day, saying indiscriminate blocking 'doesn't feel good' and apologizing to customers who bought it expecting support. Two days later Apple began automatically refunding every purchase.
The pull lands mid-escalation: blockers had just swept the App Store while some publishers responded by hiding content from blocker users, and Arment's own August essay argued the web's profusion of privacy-violating trackers had already invalidated the idea that blocking violates an implied contract — making his retreat from the category itself notable rather than principled-only.
First-order effects
- Every Peace buyer is made whole automatically by Apple, but the top-paid slot is vacated and the customers who bought on Arment's reputation are left with an app he has explicitly disowned.
- Arment absorbs the reputational cost directly: pulling a chart-topping product two days in converts his biggest commercial success into a public statement against his own customers' use case.
Second-order effects
- Rival blocker developers inherit a raised bar — Arment's framing of 'indiscriminate' blocking as unfair hands publishers and Apple a respected insider's argument for distinguishing acceptable filtering from blanket blocking, just as publishers escalate by hiding content from blocked users.
- The refund sets a precedent for how the App Store handles abruptly abandoned paid apps, shifting some of the developer's exit cost onto Apple's systems.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — a viral spike followed by ethical retreat, publisher countermeasures, and fading installs — iOS content blocking settles into a niche utility rather than a platform-shaking market, with chart position proving a poor predictor of staying power.
The trend: iOS 9's content-blocker gold rush is burning out almost as fast as it ignited, as ethical qualms among its own makers and publisher pushback cool a market that peaked at launch.