It could’ve been. You and me probably would’ve blocked ads regardless of their content for various reasons, but I’d imagine that Google wouldn’t have reached this critical mass prompting this scheme if their ads were properly vetted.

The technologically literate capable of installing ad blockers are the minority, and those who’d do it out of principle are a smaller subset of those

Firefox is looking to implement Manifest V3 to keep extension feature parity with Chromium, but their version will not ban the one API that adblockers use. So Firefox will eventually be V3 compliant

Note that SM64 (and OoT, but I don’t think that’s on Android yet) are special cases. These have been reverse engineered by the community to the point that they’ve manually decompiled the entire game, and then separately ported to modern platforms. The project in the OP is different, as it’s made for games that don’t have this effort behind them

Years ago I used to use an app called “AdSkip” or something along those lines that used the accessibility API to automatically mute and skip all YouTube ads. I’d imagine the screen black-out would be trivial to add on top

Now I’m curious, what age were you before you thought you turned 36?

98% of people I see leaving Twitter are headed for BlueSky, not Mastodon

Used to think otherwise, that I was immune to the phenomenon that you’re describing. But then the other day I realised my shoes were hurting my feet. I was seriously considering buying shoe inserts (if that’s their English name), even had the brand in mind, until I realised what was happening.

I’ve seen ads for this brand on tv like a decade ago. Before that, I honestly had no clue such things existed, I’d seen them in a store like, twice. Never seen anything related to them ever since. Literally forgot about them until I felt the slightest urge to buy them. I was really taken aback when I realised what had happened in my “advertising-immune” mind