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.
How is this feature different from the 1Blocker Firewall?
https://support.1blocker.com/en/articles/10330106-where-is-firewall
Or, just on the Mac, Little Snitch?
Little snitch brings to onus of blocking on the user. Here, with apps like this, the blacklist of domains known to be for tracking and serving ads, so they are hidden by default, while other requests are let through without asking the user. With all these apps, their success depends on how expansive their blacklist is and how often it is maintained. There are many public lists:
https://firebog.net/
So assuming most use them and offer a comparable experience.
I used to be a believer in host-based blocks (using DNS in a way similar to PiHole, but implemented by hand using the same lists) but the false positive hit rate got to be too much and I eventually concluded that DNS blocking wasn't the way. I now use exclusively webview-based content blocking with Roadblock, but now it's subscription software (but very inexpensive!) so I might reevaluate my position on host blocking if I move to 1Blocker (for which I've already paid).
