[tylersgordon]

I wonder why he made this decision after launching. The consequences and economics of ad-blocking are nothing new or surprising, and I'm sure he knew this while developing the app. Sounds like he was threatened or blackmailed.

[markbnj]

Meh, who knows, but tossing the word "blackmailed" in there is unnecessarily sensationalist, imo. All sorts of things can be "known" in the abstract, and still feel far more intense when experienced in reality.

[tylersgordon]

Yeah, I agree.

[hullo]

One can easily take him at his word that he did not expect to be pinned to #1 on the app sales charts, because that would have been a crazy thing to expect. With that came the kind of attention that he's show drives him crazy in the past, it really is a Flappy Bird analog.

[spike021]

Don't adblockers already top browser extension "stores" top downloads lists?

Seems like the type of extension that is in fact very popular, rather than some niche one that only a few thousand out of millions of people would use.

[smacktoward]

Probably not "threatened" so much as chagrined by the flood of "ad blockers are killing the independent web" articles that accompanied the release of the iOS ad blockers, such as this one from The Verge: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/17/9338963/welcome-to-hell-ap...

It's one thing to know you're hurting somebody's livelihood in the abstract, it's another to have them specifically call you out over it.