Magic Lasso Adblock 5.0
Magic Lasso Adblock v5.0 now lets you block ads and trackers across all apps on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac — not just in Safari.
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Whether you’re scrolling through social media, playing games, or reading the news (including Apple News), ads are blocked automatically — creating a cleaner, faster experience across your device.
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Many apps secretly track your activity and sell your data to third parties. App Ad Blocking helps shut down these trackers before they load, giving you stronger privacy everywhere.
My concern with ad blocking is always that it will accidentally block something that isn’t an ad and break a site (or, with the new version, an app). However, in my testing so far, that hasn’t happened. For blocking outside of Safari, it uses a network extension, and this currently doesn’t support the same fine-grained control as the Safari extension; but, if necessary, you can quickly toggle all of the blocking on/off from the Magic Lasso Adblock app.
After iOS began registering taps immediately, I found scrolling apps with interstitial ads — particularly news apps like those from CBC News and the New York Times — to be particularly hostile. I would scroll and then, while intending to stop the scroll, often tap on an ad which would send me to Safari. Irritating. Not all ads are blocked in these apps, but enough are that it has improved my news reading.
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I’ve been a longtime user of 1Blocker and have always been happy with it. I’m curious how Magic Lasso compares, if anyone has direct experience w both.
Unless it breaks SSL in the network extension, it's only doing domain-level blocking, which is very limited, to say the least. If it is breaking SSL, can such an app be trusted these days? It's a difficult dilemma when designing a product; create a limited product or create a more complete one that nobody would (or should) trust.
@Léo Magic Lasso is only doing domain-level blocking and it is not breaking SSL.
As you note, this is more limited than interrogating the request or traffic itself, but is still effective in blocking many ads and trackers in apps.
In my development testing of this feature on my Mac, App Ad Blocking is stopping hundreds of items per hour, which is even more than I thought would be occurring.
This v5.0 release is just the initial iteration of the feature and there are plans for additions and enhancement which will make the feature even more useful for future releases.
