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Better Blocker: thank you for our best week yet!

App Store Connect graph of Better Blocker’s lifetime sales. It shows two peaks, one at the original launch, two years ago, and one at the start of last week. A red line connecting the peaks makes it clear that the one from last week is higher.

Better Blocker’s sales last week topped our original launch, two years ago.

Laura and I want to thank those of you who purchased Better Blocker last week. Thanks to you, we had our best week ever and sold over 2,500 units. That’s quite something given that we have sold just over 20,000 units in total over the last two years.

Graph showing the percentage increase in unit sales for Better Blocker: sales are up over 999%

Better Blocker: sales are up over 999%.

The Better Blocker macOS app became the #1 paid app overall on the Netherlands app store and in Guatalama1, entered the top ten in 14 countries, and was in the top 100 in 27 countries.

Screenshot of the Better Blocker introduction. It’s a popover from the status bar. Copy reads: “Better. Please activate Better in Safari to get started.” There is a screenshot of the Extensions tab active in the Safari Preferences window showing exactly where and how to do that. The bottom of the popover has a button titled Launch Safari.

The newly-redesigned Better Blocker on macOS Mojave.

The statistics cover the week from the launch of the new design of the iOS app to yesterday, when the new macOS app had been live for just a day or two and we hadn’t even properly announced it yet as we were waiting for yesterday’s Mojave launch to do so.2

The uptick seems to be driven in large part by sales of the macOS app, combined with an upturn in interest in the iOS 12 app since the launch of the new design. The rise in macOS purchases also no doubt corresponds with some popular legacy “ad block” Safari Extensions becoming unusable under Safari 12.

It’s too soon to tell what the longer-term impact of lowering the price on the iOS and macOS apps to the lowest tier ($0.99/£0.99/€1.09/etc.) will be on purchases. I hope that it will at least mean that price will not be a stumbling block in your being protected by Better.3 The more people are protected from trackers, the better our herd immunity against surveillance capitalism.4

Laura and I are so happy to see the renewed interest in Better. Thank you for enabling us to keep working on Better and thank you for telling your friends about Better.

You can purchase Better Blocker for iOS and Better Blocker for macOS on the App Store.

  1. We were also 2nd in Estonia, 3rd in Germany and 4th in Poland and rose to #18 in the US app store. ↩︎

  2. We don’t have a marketing budget and we don’t use online ads (guess why) so by “properly announce” I mean toot about it on Mastodon and tweet about it and hope that people tell their friends via word of mouth. So do tell your friends about Better Blocker, it’s the main way people hear about it. ↩︎

  3. You can also download the source code for the Better apps for free and build them yourself for macOS and iOS. Better is “free as in freedom” software and released under a GPLv3 license. There is also an EasyList version of the Better tracker blocking rules that you can use in uBlock Origin on other platforms and browsers. If you’re on Linux, see these instructions for using the Better Blocker tracking rules with Gnome Web. ↩︎

  4. See Better Blocker: two year review and thoughts on the future for further discussion on the direction we’re heading in with Better. ↩︎