If you bought Peace, it’ll keep working, but will never see an update.
If you want your money back, here’s a writeup by Rene Ritchie on how to do that.
Here’s the link to Marco’s explanation.
Marco pulls Peace from the App Store: “Just doesn’t feel good”
Marco has a history of backpedaling like this. It’s obvious that he caves to pushback from industry heavies when it serves his best interest.
I asked for a refund. BS.
Uh, well. Whatever he did elsewhere, having ethical concerns is nothing bad.
Personally, I would have favored a move at a later time, e.g. once there is a little victory here… The very minute one of the big ad networks makes a move, e.g. saying we will offer a distinct line of ads that is tracking and behavioral analysis free (thus allowing to selectively and safely enable those and not the others)… I am willing to watch these. I did not go crazy about newspaper ads for decades. But those did not know who I am, where I live, how long I have been looking at them and none of that other shit I will not agree to.
This is not about putting publishers out of business, this is about decency. They lost that…
TL;DR: “I don’t feel like dealing with all this BS. I’m out.”
If his best interest isn’t making a bunch of money in the app store, then what are they?
He should have thought this through before he made the app. Perhaps he could have built one that makes it very easy for people to switch back and forth between blocking or not as well as very easy to whitelist. For that matter, default to whitelist and then block only as needed (as the user is annoyed, they press a button), since it sounds like he is having second thoughts about blanket blocking.
None of that is possible with iOS content blockers.
Thanks. I was under the impression there was more to the controls and settings, maybe from reading the options on one of the offered blockers. I’ll look into it further.
“My friends like John Gruber complained that it was blocking their ads, so I’m out.”
That’s what happened. Gruber might be right about The Deck, and I enable it on OS X Ghosterly, but the optics on this are terrible.
Actually, there is a mechanism in Peace, where you can add to the Share sheet controls to open a page with it on, open a page with it off, and quickly access the settings for the page.
(I realize “quick” is a subjective term).
What I’d really like (and what I think Steven Fisher is referencing below) is the ability to block SCRIPT BY SCRIPT instead of SITE BY SITE (a la Ghostery for the desktop).
I would believe that Daring Fireball readers are, overall, savvy enough to be able to whitelist sites they feel are responsible with their ads.
The current mechanism is not equivalent to extensions in desktop browsers, it is really just a pipe to a background app, which you can’t interact with. All the share sheet extensions are after the fact and actually cause a reload. So, if the default setting would be open, all the tracking data would have been delivered already. And reloading without it would not make any sense. Embedding buttons (allow this) might be possible, if there is a way to send commands to the blocking app (using URL modifiers or so), but I haven’t seen anybody doing that yet…
The “app” doesn’t actually do any of the blocking, it just creates a JSON file that gets passed on to Safari with the rules on what should be blocked.
TL;DR – “The rest of the folks in my clique aren’t retired off of Tumblr money and they make their money off ads so the next WWDC would be super awkward for me.”
It’s easy for me who is not writing software aanymore to fling monkey shit from the sidelines. So I figure that he can do whatever the hell he wants.
Some of the things Marco has done over the years have indicated to me that his best interest is not money. He has plenty of money, trust me.
The thing Marco likes more than anything in the world is drama directed in his direction. He drops a bomb on his blog, all the big tech sites take it and run with it, he gets a TON of attention for it and then a day or two later expresses his regret for saying or doing whatever he said or did. He then claims he’s going to do the right thing even though it will probably draw criticism. Everyone then praises him for “taking the high road”. He gets his critics too, but to him, it’s all good attention.
If you want a textbook case of this, see his blog post about Apple “losing the functional high ground” and then his redaction two days later. He ripped Apple a new one, stirred up a media frenzy, let it get to a fever pitch for a couple of days, then took it all back and apologized for it.
Marco Arment is a petulant child who loves any attention he can get, whether it be positive or negative.
I asked for my money back as well, and will not buy any more software by this joker.
While money is important – sometimes very important – money is and never was, “everything”. I think this is often some people, fail to realize and while Apple is never perfect, they too seem to sometimes operation on ideas not “what’s the best ROI on this product” …
that’s an odd thing to say … but maybe you only bring the baggage that you take.
Explain.
I expect to leave the blocker on as a default, and if I find myself going back to the site for more to then turn it off so the publisher can gain by my visiting. Once it’s off, I’ll then have to make a determination of whether the ads (and tracking) are too awful to put up with. Then I guess don’t go back.
I make an exception for sites I already pay for. I feel fine blocking ads on those.
The issue is, at least how Peace worked, you are unable to globally enable an ad source like The Deck the way Ghosterly allows on desktop. Why Marco didn’t simply work to add that granularity instead I’ll never know, but I do know he took a lot of heat from Gruber and company before pulling Peace. Gruber who is very pro content blocking as long as it’s not his content. (I know his argument is more nuanced, but that’s how it played out.)
What a fucking weenie.
I’d love to see some stats on what it did to ad impressions, for it’s short but intense life. Given it’s popularity, I can imagine a noticeable dip.
He didn’t in order to ship. He even said this and that he was going to add that option in an update.
Well, you can do whatever you want in the app. But you can’t modify behaviour from the browser, so the idea of tapping things that annoy you is never going to work well.
FWIW, I think using the Ghostery database was a terrific choice. The difficulty is that the app was too simple things well.
A version of Ghostery for iOS that uses settings from my Mac would be perfect.
Right. 🙂 If I trust Disqus and The Deck, I trust them everywhere. If I distrust DoubleClick, I distrust it everywhere. It doesn’t make sense to me to white list The Loop (which doesn’t use DoubleClick, but pretend it did) to get DoubleClick and The Deck when I can just white list The Deck.
Ah, so it is possible? That’s great news…at some point someone will do it.
I bought Peace, but since it won’t be updated I have to assume that the list of scripts to block will grow and it won’t keep up.
I really don’t understand these people who talk about their ethical problems with adblocking on the web. When they read a paper magazine, do they gaze with attention at each and every ad? When they watch TV, do they sit in their chair and raptly watch the screen during the entirety of each and every commercial break? I doubt it.
When they’re watching timeshifted TV, do they think it’s stealing money from the broadcasters to fast forward through the ads? Don’t make me laugh. But when it comes to reading the web, somehow they think it’s wrong to do the exact same equivalent of skipping past the commercials? Such hypocrites.
It doesn’t matter if you write software or not.
You can decide what is right or wrong before you start accepting people’s money.
It’s not difficult.
Gruber reportedly tried to talk Marco out of removing the app.
Apples and oranges.
On TV, the broadcasters already have their money. The most that can happen is data shows a change in audience numbers so advertisers pull.
On the web, money isn’t made unless the ad is actually delivered, sometimes unless the ad is actually clicked on, and sometimes not unless something is actually bought after the click through. In the first case, you definitely are taking money away from the publisher and consuming the content they have made for free. In the latter cases, you never see the ad and never have a chance to click through and purchase, so one could argue you aren’t taking money away, but it’s definitely a morally gray area if you believe you should pay something — whether that be money or eyeball time — to the websites you frequent.
What a dickwad. I know he’s well regarded and influential in Apple circles, but honestly this is bullshit. He codes an app and submits it, charges for it, and then 24 hours later has a crisis of conscience and pulls it, essentially telling everyone who bought it “sucks to be you”. Now anyone who wants their money back has to waste their time, and Apple’s time, asking for a refund.
It’s not about the money, it’s the principle of the thing. By submitting the app and selling it there’s an implied agreement that he’ll support the app and update it periodically, at least for a reasonable period of time. I didn’t pay $3 to rent the app for a day, and I shouldn’t have to waste my time, and Apple’s time, asking for my money back.
I suspect most people won’t bother, so Marco just gets to cash a nice cheque from having the #1 app for a day and then have zero obligation to the people who paid for the app. It’s a dick move and his reasons don’t excuse the behaviour.
Ads are ads. It’s not the reader’s problem that the publishers have bought into a system that denies them money if the ad is blocked. Advertising is a nuisance and we all have every right to ignore it. If the advertiser makes it impossible to ignore, we all have every right to block or bypass it. To argue otherwise is to declare that we all have a duty to enslave our minds and our attentions to the whims of corporations. It’s Kafkaesque.
Uh huh. So his article on the ethics of ad blocking (http://www.marco.org/2015/08/11/ad-blocking-ethics) and his post on why Peace blocked The Deck ads were just hot air?
Marco seems to have no stomach for conflict or of people not liking what he’s said or done. Intellectually he seems fine with ad blocking but when people disliked what he did with Peace… /backpedal, please don’t hate me.
$3 is trivial but I still asked for a refund out of principle. It’s bullshit to write an app (even a simple one like this) go to the trouble of licensing Ghostery’s database and then, only 2 days in, because he was catching flack, bail.
Marco might be a nice guy. He’s definitely a good developer. But he should never run a business that puts him in the position of doing or saying anything controversial as he pretty obviously doesn’t like to be involved in the turmoil that ensues.
I honestly don’t know whether to applaud Marco for heeding his conscience over those issues, or to ridicule him for not having thought of them before he chose to code the app.
For such a talented guy, he sure can be a bit of a noodle-head.
You can disable content blocking by tapping and holding on the ‘Refresh’ button in Safari.
As far as I’m concerned, the ad networks made their bed. Now they can lie in it.
There would be no need for content blocking if the situation with online advertising hadn’t become the shit-show that it is now. One of the reasons Apple created content blocking was because of the shady practices (and bandwidth-consuming) that ad networks incorporate.
You don’t have to read any further than Rob Leathern’s article that was on The Loop back on 9/3. I support websites (like The Loop and Daring Fireball) that use ad networks that DON’T track me all across the web and that DON’T consume megabytes of data for a single page load.
I don’t know Marco personally, but this is the second time in recent memory that he’s withdrawn in the face of controversy (the other was his article ripping Apple and his “Oh, I didn’t think it would blow up like it did” retraction two days later). I don’t know if he wants the attention or what his deal is, but there’s got to be more going on that “it just doesn’t feel good making money”. He had to have know the ramifications of his app before he created it and his explanation rings hollow to me.
What are the ethics of raking in thousands, probably tens of thousands of dollars on an app and then, not 72 hours after release, saying “nah, I’m out?” Yes, we can get a refund, but how many people bought it and will not see this news and just go on? Sorry, but this sits wrong with me.
I was not talking about that part (and agree). The ethical part is making yourself the de facto censor, with your code deciding what people will see, and maybe the effect on small publishers (well, the latter he could have figured out earlier I guess).
Sad to say I’ve lost all respect for Marco with this move. Asking for a refund.
And… He doesn’t even take the time to explain how one requests a refund, and instead directs people to another site. Little sympathy on the way he’s handling this.
Attention Whore.
FWIW, I applied for my refund this afternoon and got the approval this evening.
But I totally agree with you. After crowing about how proud he was of himself a couple of days ago for having a top ranked app in the App Store, now he’s suddenly jumping ship because “it doesn’t feel good”? He’s been working on this for a long time and teamed up with probably the best ad blocker out there, releases an app that’s an instant hit, and then bails. Very ethical to your users, Marco.
And you’re right–a lot of people will not see that and continue using the app not knowing that it’s not updating or being supported anymore.
As many people have said, if looking at an ad in the print edition of The Economist sent my demographics, magazine reading history, enough anonymized personal information that the aggregate is enough to identify me, and the list of articles I’d read to any number of unknown figures not just while I looked at the ad, but for a half hour afterward to build a thoroughly de-anonymized profile that was sold for money on markets I didn’t even know existed, yes, I would have an ethical problem with that.
This is the true problem, and it’s something a lot of people don’t seem to understand about Marco. This latest incident just fits a pattern that he repeats over and over:
I have no patience for it anymore. He writes great software, but I will never buy anything of his again.
Exactly. What did he learn in the 24 hours that he was collecting money from people that he didn’t know beforehand? The assumption that ‘conscience’ had anything to do with his behavior is unfounded given his current and past writings on the subject. The cost of his moral preening is thousands of dollars wasted or multitudes of time wasted. What a jackass.
WTF?
Yeah. Thanks Marco. Guess what? Now I’m delisting all the sites that used “The Deck”. At least they put up responsible ads that weren’t intrusive. Glad you made your money.
Let him keep the money… hopefully he’ll wipe his ass with it. Which is pretty much what he did with my loyalty.
What’s really maddening is I feel like I’m the victim of some kind of stunt, and as a result, betrayed. Yeah, he pulled it of getting all the attention and press. But what about the people who put their trust in him and forked over the money to help get him all that attention? Needles to say I won’t be listening to his podcasts anymore.
On his website: “If you want a refund, here’s how you do that.”
If ??? I think he’s still not getting it.
At least take the high road and instead say: “Here’s how you can get your money back. I apologize for putting everyone through this”
And then put in the few minutes it takes to explain how it’s done, rather than linking to and relying on another’s website and work.
“Joker?!” I bought Peace on the merits of his software portfolio, for him to give up a lot of money for ethical reasons shows he is no joker or charlatan…
I will be getting a refund too, and am not happy, but that Is because Marco will not be supporting/upgrading Peace.. And in fact I’m investigating how I can “roll my own” similar, possibly ethical blocker using Ghostery too.
$3 out of pocket, for less than about 72 hours? I don’t think he’s trying to rob anyone.
He should think things through BEFORE he released the app.
Asking for a refund and also ask Apple to make a rule that prohibit this kind of behaviour from developers in the future. App needed to be supported or updated for a certain period of time.
Not a big deal, I bought the app and asked for a refund, Apple granted it a few hours later. Of course I follow this stuff and I know a lot of people who bought the app might not. I’d love to see Marco post the numbers of how many people bought the app vs. how many asked for a refund.
On a side note; I rarely use Safari to browse anyway. Most of the time I read sites like this one in Reeder on my iPhone or in the Twitter apps built-in browser. So not really a huge deal for me personally.
That much is obvious. What does he think is gonna happen? We live in capitalist societies. If he doesn’t do it someone else will and they’ll most likely do it in a less elegant and more brute force way. He’s putting himself up on the cross for headlines. Fuck him.
Dude you need to open your eyes to just how cynical some people are in this world. It wasn’t about ethics for him. You don’t back peddle on clearly strongly held views and $50k a day based on ethics. He’s a shit stirrer with money to burn who loves to see his name in headlines. A talented shit stirrer but a shit stirrer nonetheless.
I feel most sorry for Parakeet who did really nice work on the icons only to see it go unused.
Gruber’s not a bad guy and it wasn’t a bad point he made about The Deck either but if his point of view matters so much to Marco, Marco might have bothered to run it by him in advance of releasing the damn thing instead of wasting all of our time – and in a lot of cases money.
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The awfulness here is, if you bought it, it stops working very soon: If you bought a 6S and restore from iCloud? It’s lost to you, and will not restore. If you need to restore your phone for any reason? It’s gone unless you downloaded it in an antiquated fashion using iTunes on a computer, and have saved that backup.
I had it for one day, had to restore my phone, and it’s gone. Would that Apple would archive apps that have been pulled so purchasers can get old versions back, but they don’t.
Say what you will about Marco, but some are asserting that he’s scamming us for money and that’s ridiculous. If he was doing that, he’d still be riding the wave of sales as he’s at the top of the app store charts, and he’d pull it in a month or too.
If Marco is guilty of anything, it’s being shortsighted for not seeing the implications of making an ad blocker before he started.
If it’s not about money then why the statement “I didn’t pay $3 to rent the app…”? If it’s not about the money, then you don’t have to waste your time asking for money back. Just move on. $3 is an insignificant amount of money for someone with a several hundred dollar phone.
He’s not censoring a thing. Content blockers let you and I decide what we’ll allow when we visit a site. To me, they redress the balance we’ve had to this point where sites could say “here, you have to deal with all of the crap we send to you, no matter how invasive or annoying.” This allows me to say “yeah, no not THAT stuff. THIS stuff I’ll allow, but not that” The power and control has all been on the publisher side – now it’s not. Now, perhaps, we can find some other solutions that account for everyone’s interests.
The problem is that most people don’t know ad networks.
Put it this way… if you buy wine you probably buy based on the winery name or perhaps on the grape (you want a Cabernet, etc). But turn a bottle around and it will show you who distributes that wine and, if it’s from outside the US, who the importer is. Now, importers specialize and knowing the importer can tell a person who’s knowledgeable about wine a lot about what that wine will be like. However, that information is useless info to most people; they don’t know the importer at all so they don’t know if it’s a small company focused on artisanal, family producers or a large regional importer who brings all kinds of stuff.
Ad networks are the same to most people. They won’t know The Deck from Doubleclick so, while you and I would like and use the setting, most people would not, yet those controls add complexity to the app.
For some of us, it’s a matter of principle. Why should Marco get to keep thousands and thousands of dollars when he’s acted like this?
It’s getting enough press that plenty of folks will find out.
I wouldn’t be shocked if some of the same sites victimized by said blocker aren’t mentioning it. After all they likely bitched at Marco about taking money to deny it to me so they’d want as many refunds as possible and fast
Except he hasn’t collected any money.
People keep forgetting that. He’s not paid right when someone downloads the app. It’s like once a month. He may not have ever seen the money from these days until like the end of Oct. plenty of time for word to get out about what happened and folks to demand their money back. Apple will do if despite the all sales are final terms either because Marco got them to agree to or because they simply don’t want to deal with folks bitching because they never bother to read said terms
He won’t. Payment is like once a month. Plenty of time for folks to demand a refund and many will. And he apparently only made about $25k in sales. 30% of which would have stayed with Apple. 30% to the database company and so on.
If you are that pissed off wouldn’t you rather he wipes his ass with the transaction history of the refunds
I might applaud him if I really believed it was his conscience and not that he got bitched at more than he was expecting
He hasn’t. Payments aren’t immediate. And this is getting enough press that most folks will probably ask for that refund before a check was ever going to be cut
Yep. Not only that, when Apple refunds a customer, I believe they still keep the 30%. So if everyone got a refund, he’d be out money.
It’s the same thing. Why re-state it when the instructions are already written? It’s handled fine. You got the information and didn’t have to search for it.
That would indeed be a more likely scenario than mine.
same here – that’s why i got the refund. he should at least donate the money to a good cause after the 14-day refund period is over. but maybe he’ll do that.
you can’t? but shouldn’t this be possible via ios extensions like the ones peace had? similar to the instapaper extension, that sends an url from the browser to the app. or the “read in instapaper” link, before there were extensions.
i don’t mind. requesting the refund took about 2 minutes of time and peace worked and still works fine for now. and he suggested other blockers on his blog, so i’ll just get one of those. maybe he should have thought more about it, before releasing the app – but, as apple is keeping it’s 30% share this might as well be a loss for him. i’ve made purchase decisions far worse for 2.99, where i couldn’t get my money back. like every big mac…
come on – you’ve lost all respect for a guy, because he changed his mind to avoid controversy and for 2.99 that you can get refunded anyway. imho those app-store controversies get blown way out of proportion. when was the last time you requested and got a refund for some 2.99 physical object that didn’t work/taste as expected and then still “lost all respect” for the seller?
sure, because 1-3$ will finance months of support for any app. sounds like a “realistic” business-model for lots of developers.
If it’s not realistic then don’t do it. Find something else that can realistically support you. This, however, is not the case with Marco. He didn’t pull the app or stopped supporting it because of financial reason.
I’d have ethical concerns not push for better privacy protection if I were in the position. He either does not understand what “tracking” means or he does not care. Blocking content is not about advertising, it is about privacy violations.
That assumes that everyone who bought the app will go through the refund process. Not likely. Prediction: Marco announces any residual income will go to some charity. Fanboys happy clap the humanity.
We don’t have a duty to enslave our minds. (Hyperbole much?) However, we do have a moral obligation to pay for a service. Sometimes that payment means we have to look at ads in order to see something. I know it is in vogue these days to expect everything to be free, but I’m sure you don’t work for free and neither should the people that create the content we like to read or watch or hear.
Ignoring is one thing, and you can do that by not returning to the website after their ad delivery offends you. Blocking the ads and returning time and again to read things is not right. You can justify itself in your head, and you probably even sleep well at night, but if someone took the things you produced without paying for it I suspect you would be singing a different tune.
… and so on”? I don’t know the cut he gave Ghostery, but I doubt it was anything like 30%. Even if it was, he’s end up with ~$10k for this. Why should Marco get that much money for being a self-centered little wuss?
You know what amuses me? This: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cjxgpxkyuhlkmgh/Screenshot%202015-09-19%2013.24.04.png?dl=0
That’s right. Directly after tweeting about how his wife really loved Ghostery on her Mac, (yay blocking!) he announced he pulled Peace. You can’t make this up.
I didn’t ask for a refund out of principle. I totally understand his feelings and salute him for making the hard decision to pull the app. Those critical of the decision seem to lack empathy or any ability to understand the finer points of what went down. I find that I respect Marco more now than before.
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You could probably write an extension to pass the page back to an app, then that app could have its own web browser (not using the Safari view controller, either) without access to content blocking (except, presumably, their own if they wrote that into their browser). There’s intentionally no communication of the results of the content blocking list back to the app.
I don’t lack empathy at all. I lack patience for someone who doesn’t think through the implications of doing something and I have followed Marco long enough to see a pattern of conflict avoidance. He seems to really hate conflict and that’s FINE. If this were a free app, eh. But keeping several thousand dollars like this feels wrong to me.
The thing is, all of this was boringly predictable. Of COURSE content blockers were going to be controversial and of COURSE as a high profile figure in the Apple universe his would be popular and he’d be in the middle of that controversy. If any of that is a surprise to him he’s incredibly unselfaware and if he didn’t want to deal with that he shouldn’t have developed the app, licensed the Ghostery db and released it.
Keep in mind this isn’t the first time Marco’s done or said something, seen a lot of backlash and retreated so some of our reaction is based on “oh, yeah, this…”
Agreed. I don’t think for a minute tis was a deliberate scam. My comments elsewhere on the thread about him keeping the money shouldn’t be read as “he did this to scam us” it just feels awkward to me for him to keep whatever he’s made when be reversed course so quickly.
Here’s a separate question: of the two alternative options he offered (Purify and Crystal), has anyone tried these out and determined which is “better”?
You sum up my feelings exactly. Marco is just interesting enough that I follow his (self-absorbed, anal-retentive) writing and podcasts …but it just makes me mad to see him hurt himself with little hissy fits like this. Remember how he acted when Pocket came on the market? Or the Kindle Fire? I think he’s matured a lot since those days a few years ago, but he’s still immature enough to not know when to shut his big gob. If he were not such an attention whore, he’d be keeping a lower profile on the internet. But nope, Marco gotta Marco.
By linking to the other site, they get some ad clicks and he feels better about himself for sending them traffic. The whole episode is a big blogger circle jerk.