Google has removed all ad blocking apps from Android from the Google Play Store, a move described by Adblock Plus as threatening consumer choice.
“I realise that advertising revenue is important to Google, but understand that Adblock Plus does not automatically block all ads, commented Till Faida, co-founder of Adblock Plus.
The rationale behind removing ad blocking apps is that they violate Section 4.4 of Google’s Developer Distribution Agreement.
Faida added that Adblock Plus even encourages advertising as long as it is “done appropriately and conforms to an Acceptable Ads policy, which is debated and decided in an open public forum”.
The free ad-blocking tool has said this move is the third in a string of actions that Google has taken against Adblock Plus as in February user were made to manually configure a proxy server in order to run Adblock Plus and in December 2012 Google re-categorised Adblock Plus in the Chrome Web store and stopped showing it in search results when users specifically looked for the extension.
When Adblock Plus re-listed as an app on 12 December 2012, it was removed by Google once again 12 hours later.