Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Google Explicitly Bans Ad Blockers From The Play Store, Except All Those Ad-Blocking Web Browsers, Apparently

Google has a brand-new website for content policy on the Play Store that it unveiled today, and that's nice, but nestled away in that news was a far more interesting story regarding ad blockers. Google has long enforced a de facto ban on ad blockers on the Play Store, citing section 4.4 of the Google Play Developer Distribution Agreement, going all the way back to 2013.

This involved a rather convoluted interpretation of a vague policy forbidding apps from interfering with third-party apps or services, but it's the official justification Google has used to date.

Google Explicitly Bans Ad Blockers From The Play Store, Except All Those Ad-Blocking Web Browsers, Apparently was written by the awesome team at Android Police.