There was a lot of noise this year with the launch of iOS 9 and content blockers, which are apps that you can you to block ads in the mobile Safari browser. Now another ad blocker is in the news, but this time it’s for Android.
AdBlock Plus has announced that starting in early 2016, its service will be built in to the default Internet browser that ships with ASUS devices. “We’re extremely happy to team up with ASUS, the first major hardware manufacturer to integrate ad blocking into their mobile devices,” said AdBlock Plus co-founder Till Faida. “This is another call for innovation in the ad industry — a call getting louder by the day.”
There are a number of ad blocker apps already available on Android, but this news is notable because we haven’t really heard of a device maker building an ad blocker into their device by default. Today’s report says that around 15 million people use the default ASUS browser, so ASUS’s decision to build an ad blocker into its devices may not have as quite a large an impact as if Samsung did the same thing, but the move is still a notable one that could lead to other device makers building an ad blocker into their browsers, too.