Adblock Fast for Android relaunches

Rejected, removed, reinstated, and approved by Google

tl;dr After removal, Adblock Fast is back in Google Play!

Our team, Rocketship, launched Adblock Fast for Android, the first app to let you block ads in Android without you having to root your device or switch to a new browser, last week. The response was pretty overwhelming – e.g., 90 articles in English alone on Google News [update (May 9): old Google News links are busted].

Last Monday, though, Google rejected an app update we submitted. Last Tuesday, they removed Adblock Fast from the Play store altogether (which 80 more English-language articles [update: another Google News link was here] covered).

We submitted an appeal on the Monday our update was rejected and we’re happy to report that Google has reversed their decision, both accepting our appeal in an email sent to us on Friday evening and approving and republishing Adblock Fast by the time we woke up this morning:

We’ve accepted your appeal and your app has been reinstated. For the app to appear on the Play Store, you’ll need to sign into your Developer Console and submit your app again.

You can get Adblock Fast for Android again!

Besides working Adblock Fast back into Google Play, we updated the app (to version 1.1.0) so we could extend support to Android 4.0 and up and could clarify the onboarding user experience for those who don’t yet have Samsung Internet 4.0.