Majority of people use their mobile devices these days to browse the Internet. Installing an ad blocker on your iPhone is a significantly bigger challenge than on desktop.
Use Firefox/Fennec which allow you to install a variety of the add-ons you can install on the desktop version such as UBO, Stylus, ViolentMonkey, Bitwarden, SponsorBlock, etc... or install Brave which comes with adblock by default. As for iPhone, you can install Brave which has adblock, I don't think Firefox has add-ons in that version though, not sure.
I don’t think you can write off Apple or Microsoft just because Thiel made some investment in them.
Being the VC to a company’s round B, C, and D (adding up to maybe 40% ownership/control) is VERY different from simply throwing some money at a trillion dollar company to see some returns.
Firefox on Android supports it without any issue. That would cover a significant enough segment of the population that it might encourage actual change in the industry if people started moving to that platform.
Firefox on Android has approximately 0.5% market share on mobile, less than Opera. I really doubt it's enough to spark any sort of industry-wide change.
I'm not saying that Firefox on Android has significant market share; rather that Android has significant market share, and those users could be served by switching to Firefox solely for the purpose of using an adblocker.
If all Android users did this, something would change.
The point is it’s easy. It’s near frictionless. Unlike a lot of pie in the sky statements I see here like how “easy” it is to install and run Linux (it isn’t), Firefox adoption is truly trivial for any smartphone user and presents a stronger baseline than chrome does. People here often get critical of Firefox/Mozilla, and I totally get it, but compared to Google Chrome it doesn’t, well, compare.
Firefox runs great 99.99% of the time. It’s easy to add extensions. So we should be pushing people to adopt it.
It’s becoming easier on iPhone (even uBlock origini is now available, if only the lite version), which is nice because internet is becoming more and more unusable without them.
AdGuard installs through the App Store and integrates seamlessly with Safari. It's not as perfect as some of the desktop class adblockers, but it's free and can be up and running in a couple minutes.
If you're on Android, Firefox supports many full desktop extensions, including uBlock Origin.
There have been mobile Safari ad blockers for 10 years now, free or paid, and many of them can now be unified with desktop Safari. Many alternative iOS browsers include ad blocking directly, since they can't use the Safari plugins (despite all being powered by WebKit).
Not anymore. You can just find one on the app store and install it, almost exactly the same as you do in a browser's extension "store". It won't be as good as uBlock but it certainly works fine even in Safari.
ublock origin lite is straight up on the app store now, should work with any moderately recent version of iOS/iPadOS. Installed this on my family's Apple devices and it works pretty well.
There's also been other adblock apps for a long while, though (adguard comes to mind).
Can't speak for IOS but for android users I highly recommend Firefox for android, since you can install ublock origin within it.
Let's be real, browsing the modern internet is downright impossible without it today.
