Today Blokada 6 with the so called „Blokada Cloud“ has been released to iOS-Users as an update.
Why the team doesn’t mention, that after the update the App became useless without paying for the „Cloud Abo“?
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Hi there,
Unfortunately that’s the only solution for now. Apple changed their ads framework and there’s no alternative to external dns based adblocking anymore.
Here’s more on that:
We’ve thoroughly looked for a solution to overcome that but the only way is cloud adblocking. We’ve brought the price for cloud down to a minimum but customisable dns infrastructure can’t be fulfilled privately and securely for free. We don’t want to sell data hence there’s no way for us other than putting a price for our dns infrastructure. There’ll be a proper press release regarding v6 shortly. Libre is still free of course. But Libre does not work on iOS because of changes made by Apple, so we had to cut it out. The only way we could make it work on iOS again was through Cloud, and that costs us money.
I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you for now
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You should have mentioned, that Blokada Cloud will be no longer free!
The todays Update for iOS renders Blokada completely useless for free users.
Why don‘t you implement a choice between the old-fashioned on-device filtering and the cloud thing?
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Because the old fashioned method doesn’t work anymore. That’s due to apple’s changes to the ads framework.
Check out the post I linked you above
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The old way of course works like a charm on my iPhone with 15.1. I didn’t notice many ads „slipping through“. Until today…
Why do you change it? Why don‘t you mention in the update description, that it is not free of charge?
Look:
I totally get that there’s frustration on your side, so please bear with us:
We’ve received a lot of complaints in the past regarding ads slipping through on iOS. We have to make sure that that doesn’t happen, everything else results in frustration.
There’ll be a press release regarding v6. We’re not intending to hide anything from anyone
Stay tuned 
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Maybe you should have released the press announcement before the update.
And you should have mentioned it in the description!
And anyway: How does it work now? Does it route all DNS-Queries to your servers?
I activated the trial now, it works as intended.
Will test for the free time an I also don’t have a problem paying for a good working solution.
Anyway, you should hire some PR people 
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I was surprised and disappointed to see Blokada become a paid by default subscription app now, and though the price is not high, it is very unclear why only iOS users need to be milked this way?
Few questions hopefully will be covered with the press release
- Can we subscribe for Blokada Cloud from the website, avoiding paying 30% to Apple? If so I am looking for a lower price for Blokada Cloud via direct purchase.
- Can we use Blokada Cloud on Android phones without the app?
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Yes, everything worked perfectly on latest iOS until Blokada single-handedly decided to become subscription service by default for iOS (more profitable sheep audience). This has very little to do with impossible to work ad framework and much more to do with profit.
No, no, no, no, no.
That’s incorrect. If we weren’t forced to implement cloud like that, we wouldn’t. Feel free to contribute on our GitHub if you’ve another solution in mind and working. We literally tried everything.
Blokada is a community driven, open-source project. Nearly everyone you’ll be in touch with is a volunteer. We do not intend to make huge profit.
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That’d require us intending to grow into a mainly profit oriented company 
Im glad to hear that everything is working as expected ^^
Feel free to join us as we dance madly on the tip of the vulcano
Maybe you can do our PR ^^
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I don’t want to be an overly harsh and typical ungrateful user, I just don’t see where the issue was on my iOS 15.1 device and I know the affinity towards subscriptions services for iOS mobile audiences are known to be higher and easier monetized via subscription than any other mobile audience. The two simple facts are simply hard to ignore.
That said, you should make it possible to subscribe to Cloud outside Apple and provide a better price doing so. Currently, my only option is to pay for VPN via your website, or pay 30% to Apple for Cloud being available at a separate yearly cost ONLY in the iOS app, or ignore your app for a while until you get things sorted out. Not being able to pay less than a WHOLE YEAR to beta test Cloud is a major bummer and turning me off from paying you now to test and decide how to proceed with the app. Lots of things change in a year, for a new method that is yet to be proven how good it works.
TL;DR: Please provide ways to pay for that service via your website, at lower cost without Apple 30%, and in a way that is not only a year investment.
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I cannot comprehend the problems you had on iOS. I‘m momentarily evaluating the „Lockdown Privacy“ App for iOS. They still use local DNS-VPN and it works well so far. As well as Blokada did before v6.
And it‘s still free. And fully Open Source. Maybe you should team up with them to get the problems sorted out.
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I wouldn’t dismiss that there was a problem, but they killed their default method of on-device blocking for a new method without giving us the option to decide whether the old method was unusable (and it was very much usable at the moment of the release of v6) and just forced us to Cloud solutions with badly thought of and just lacking flexibility of paying for the service. It really forces us to make a very bad purchase decision (a whole year, pay 30% to Apple, no way otherwise) or not use Blokada at all.
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Hello,
Thanks a lot for bringing up the concerns, we will try to address this in the official announcement later. We just started rolling out this release a few hours ago, let us settle for a bit
I’d just like to add right away that you can actually use the same account ID (found in the settings in the app) on an unlimited number of devices, including desktop and Android. You simply enter this account ID when logging into app.blokada.org and follow the setup instructions for Blokada Cloud in there.
We will make this fact more clear in a future update.
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Speaking about it, does Blokada Plus include Blokada Cloud in the yearly sub? Or are they two different services? Does anyone know for sure?
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Plus includes Cloud
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I tried Lockdown, but as a Blokada alternative, it fails miserably. On the Blokada test, it only scores 23%, while a PC uBlock scores 90%. Though until Blokada sorts out their offering, it will have to do.
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