Alright. I’ve never participated in this forum, but do have a degree of relevant expertise (a master’s in psychology and several years of working media-based advocacy) and a stake in this (as a Blokada user). Given the clusterfuck that is this mess, I created this account to stick my fingers in. Please feel free to ignore what I’m saying here – although I advise strongly that you do otherwise.
The core of the problem here isn’t Apple’s changes. It isn’t that ads got through your protection. It’s that you handled the issue in a manner that’s objectively terrible.
You are a community-driven, trust-based project that provides an admittedly important service for your consumers, most of whom are nowhere near as familiar with the technical side of things as you are. You took a free application, and updated it to remove all non-paid functionality without announcing that you were doing so.
This is terrible optics, and a breach of the community’s trust, regardless of why you did it.
You note that Apple’s changes meant that ads were sneaking through the basic, free level of protection (“libre”) and that you removed it because of complaints… but the fact that ads were getting through doesn’t change the fact that some ads weren’t. It was, in other words, still viable (if imperfect) functionality.
And, again, it was removed without announcement, in a manner that at least looks like a bait-and-switch of the sort used by particularly sleazy for-profit productions. The optics were terrible.
So this begs two questions: One, how should this have been handled? And two, what should you do now?
For the first, the answer is quite simple: Without deliberately sabotaging the app for the people who rely on it. The ideal answer would have been a message regarding Apple’s sabotage of the ad-blocking method you were using and explaining why you needed to charge for Blokada Cloud – ideally pushed when the the new version of the app was opened for the first time.
I could probably write one, but it’s a bit much for a hypothetical in a message that’s already as long as this is.
For the second… you aren’t a corporation, so don’t act like one. Apologize and fix the problem. Restore the Libre functionality (as imperfect as it is), and include some variant of the aforementioned notification – one that includes the aforementioned apology – with the next version.
And release said version as soon as possible.
At a minimum, the apology should directly address the optics issue above, and contain a further promise to never again sabotage the app.
The standard advice, I know, is to never admit fault… but, again, this isn’t the usual situation – there isn’t a liability risk involved, and long-term trust and maintaining a sense of community, trust, and accountability is more important than nearly anything else. Saying “We were wrong” goes a long way there.
And it does a heck of a lot to distance you from the usual sleazy corporate types.