As a ton of other people have stated, how is this different from the tons of adblockers (or ClickToFlash) that already exist?

Because it's in the official Safari build, released by Apple.

Firefox does not come with an ad blocker. Opera doesn't come with an ad blocker. IE doesn't come with an ad blocker. Chrome of course doesn't come with an ad blocker.

Now a company that just moved (very heavily) into ads is releasing an ad blocker in their browser. It would almost seem like they're trying to hasten the death of the web, however meager their attempt, to push content producers to a walled garden of pay only content.

And then you can exasperate about how you want free content without ads.

Is that an actual serious question?

Yes, the point being: If you don't like it, don't go there. Find content that doesn't have annoying ads and multi-page content.

Apple is, ultimately, selling their product (Safari, selling in the sense of trying to get marketshare) on the backs of content producers.

"Look at all this clean content we bring you!" (when actually they don't bring anything, and undermine that which they claim to make easier to consume)

Case in point, when I read a magazine, I certainly see advertisements...but those advertisements are not animated, they do not make it difficult to turn the page and read a new article, they do not cause a pile of advertisements to appear underneath the magazine, etc.

I find current magazines to be close to intolerable because of advertisements (and that's a case where you are purportedly paying for the content!) Not only is a serious portion of the space dedicated to ads, many of them trying their best to confuse you into thinking they're content, they lead to other insidious behaviors-

-Magazines often cut out a large percentage of page numbers specifically to force you to scan through ads. It's also why they split stories. The ad companies have a lot of research driving this.

-You have a conflict of interest when the authors' jobs depend upon the people they're talking about in many cases. Many computer-related magazines were well known for soft-balling companies that advertised heavily.

Advertisements suck. They pervert the entire content system.

You'll find a lot of misinformation about the Safari Reader feature because it removes ads and combines those incredibly annoying multi-page articles into one page

If they're annoying, why do you read them? Why do you go to sites with ads you don't like?

I'm not saying that in a judgmental fashion -- I use ABP and greatly enjoy it. I just realize that I'm having my cake and eating it too, and it's grossly unsustainable. Will Apple provide a similar feature to block iAds from the iOS ecosystem?

We need to revisit micropayments. The ad supported model is a continual cycle of unwanted side effects.

Android makes money for Google for one very simple reason: Ads. Nothing more. Google bought Android because they wanted to have a mobile ad platform that they controlled.

They're doing an amazingly poor job of it, then. I've been using Android for a year now, and I honestly don't remember the last time I saw an ad outside of the browser.

No, what ensures this doesn't happen is that Google will pay handset makers to stay with Google. It's essentially AdSense applied to mobiles.

So what's the problem? Motorola is already selling one Android device with Bing on it. Turns out there are a lot of companies that will pay money to have their systems on handsets. APPLE, for crying out loud, could make a deal to provide primary services in Android with one of the handset makers, and there is nothing in the Android ecosystem that blocks that. I think you're missing the core point here.

No. Google made a calculation: either stay as one play of many on iPhone (and other phones), or burn their bridges with Apple, and forge ahead being the dominant player on their own mobile OS.

See, there's a core theme that you're missing here. It isn't Google's OS. Motorola can completely pull out Google hook-ins. HTC can. Samsung can. Sony can. If customers preferred Bing, they could do it for competitive reasons. Making Android guaranteed Google nothing.

Google had been sitting on Android for some time (actually before the iPhone project even began). It really took off, however, when it became clear that Apple was poised to dominate the smartphone market. A single vendor dominating would have been devastating to Google.

So you think Google should let Microsoft insert Bing search results and ads into Google search results pages?

This is bordering on comical.

The closest analogy -- even though analogies are a horrendous way to understand a point -- would be Dell declaring that all webpages showing ads on Dell computers have to run the ads through Dell's ad network. Your analogy is terrible.

You have to opt-in to iAd and other ad networks are still running today in third party iPhone apps, Apple has not banned third party networks, and the limitation on the third party networks equally apply also for Apple's own iAd.

Apple effectively made iAd the only option for in-application advertisements, because ad networks can't run without analytics. And no, the restrictions don't apply to Apple, and it's ludicrous to claim they do. The restriction was completely made to target Google/Admob, just as 3.3.1 targeted Flash.

You clearly have nothing to do with business.

Nonetheless, I have no doubt that Google is going to double down on Android. It's interesting that every time Steve Jobs has one of his petulant tantrums the rate of Android development accelerates. While a year ago it seemed like a generally unloved step-child, and we know that Google low-balled it to avoid offending Apple, today it feels like a rocket ship. Every restriction Apple imposes will be their own undoing.

Android is not a legitimate mobile phone software business but rather a way to leverage Google's Web ad monopoly into mobile ads?

Not a very clever retort. Lots of businesses have strategic projects that couldn't stand alone, but that have critical organizational importance. Android is that way for Google. To say that makes it "not legitimate" is facile.

Also, try to ignore the fact that if Google didn't have Android, they wouldn't be locked out of iOS. Because it really fucks up your whole argument.

Yeah, too bad I don't believe that. Apple effectively cut out every other large competitive advertiser on the heels of launching their own ad network. Unless you have a time machine, you have zero knowledge of what would have happened if Google didn't have Android. I would posit that Google would be looking at a grim future where the future of computing -- the mobile space -- had completely locked them out.

I mean it's not exactly startling that your direct competition doesn't want you advertising on their device.

So when you buy an iPhone, you accept that it's still Steve's? Wow.

Note that we're talking about ads in third-party applications. Meaning as a third-party application developer, Apple has now said "Oh, and by the way if you want to advertise, your only real choice is us." How is that defensible?

And do you accept that the Safari browser on the iOS devices has the right to purge all web ads and replace them with Apple ads? Why not, right?

You can't reasonably run ads without analytics. The entire ad industry depends upon analytics.

One of the reasons Android is an important project for Google -- it makes them little, if any, money, despite a half-baked plan to sell their own handset -- is exactly this scenario. Google's fear was that a single vendor would have too much control to cut them out. So Android was birthed, and there are many vendors. And for those who might not know, any Android handset vendor has the full ability to replace Google with Bing, or to cut out Google ads in other forms, yet the "fragmentation" of the market ensures that there isn't an overly one-sided power distribution.

So is Apple being testy because of Android....or is this the gameplan all along, and Android was a good pre-emptive strike?

My G1 runs 2.1 and opengl apps run great...

The GPU of the G1 is horribly underpowered, the processor not supporting NEON, and the RAM on the device is barely capable of running the OS alone. The G1 is the reason gaming on the Android platform is still so immature.

Phones like the Nexus One, the Samsung Galaxy S, and the Moto Droid are magnitudes more powerful in the graphics department.

Or do I give up the 25% of the market that is Android 1.5?

Most of the phones that run 1.5 right now are terribly underpowered -- OpenGL on a G1 is almost a sick joke.

If you're targeting OpenGL, you probably should cut your losses and cut them.

If you look at a recent app produced by Google, the Twitter app, you'll see that it is unavailable to a huge percentage of the market because they don't support older versions of Android with it.

The Twitter application is an Android showpiece app, which is why it targets 2.1. They wanted to use animated wallpaper, quick contact bars, and so on, to highlight the best of the contemporary platform. Aside from the fact that about 50% of Android phones are running 2.1 right now, most other phones are going to see a 2.1 upgrade in the relatively short term. I suspect Google intentionally targets 2.1 to try to motivate the vendors to expedite their upgrades.

The problem is (from an app developer standpoint) is that there are too many variables in the android world to code an app once to run successfully across the ecosystem.

Yet strangely many people are successfully doing this.

You have to design a version for on-screen keyboards (because it'll use part of the screen real estate) separately from a version that uses a hardware keyboard. They don't need to be separate apps, but you need to design (visually at least) for both scenarios, or you end up locking out a good portion of the people who use android devices.

Completely wrong. Where are you getting this from?

Sure, there are 100,000+ android devices out there

Over 100,000 Android devices activated per day.

so in order to sell your app on all 100,000 of those phones you've got to tweak your app for each device

No you don't. You have no idea what you're talking about. And you're at Score:4 right now, which is shameful.

One way to call the Camera API

Ugh. You shouldn't have posted because almost everything you have said is just completely wrong.

The Android developer platform is extraordinarily universal. There's a density independent pixel format (which is how an app looks almost the same on a 320x480 screen as it looks on a 480x800 screen), support for varying screen ratios, a single way to inter-operate with the camera and send emails and read the GPS signal and get orientation signals, or even do advance OpenGL graphics.

One app to rule them all.

There are of course differences and occasionally "quirks". If you make a rich graphics game it's going to run terribly on a G1. Flash is only available on some devices. And of course if you have to target a newer API, presumably because it has a feature that you can't live without, you limit your app to that version and above (just as if I use Transactional Filesystem calls my Windows app would be Vista or newer).