Ad blockers arrive on iOS 9/17/15

Update: Not long after I posted this article, Marco Arment pulled Peace from the App Store. Crystal is still for sale, and I’ve also been testing Purify, a blocker from the folks who made uBlock for desktop browsers.

Yesterday Apple released iOS 9, and that means a bevy of iOS ad content blockers are also available. Since I updated my iPhone and iPad to iOS 9, I’ve been trying Peace by Marco Arment and Crystal by Dean Murphy.

Peace costs $3 and is powered by the database from the popular desktop ad blocker Ghostery. Crystal is $1 and uses a proprietary block list that Murphy is promising to update with feedback users can provide through the app’s Report Site feature.

Both apps have significantly sped up the time it takes for many web pages to load and give you the confidence that your activity is not being tracked by unscrupulous ad networks. For now, Peace may be the better of the two, since you can flip a switch in the settings and also block custom fonts from downloading. That alone could be a money saver for people who are going over their monthly data caps.