Magic Lasso Adblock 2025 Year in Review: Focus Fuelled Our Growth

As the financial year wraps up, it’s the perfect time to look back on the past 12 months — a year in which we debated whether to diversify or to focus.

Long story short, we chose to focus — but broaden our focus. That meant investing more into what Magic Lasso Adblock does best: fast, private, and reliable ad blocking for Apple users.

Rather than diversify and build something completely new, we broadened what our core product could do: with support for blocking of ads and trackers across all apps, not just in Safari.

Read on to hear about a year filled with new features, unexpected marketing wins, a few stressful moments, and, most importantly, a clearer sense of direction.

These Year in Review posts are a now regular Magic Lasso tradition; if you have the time, read the previous posts in the series: 2024 Year in Review, 2023 Year in Review, 2018 Year in Review.

Where Are We Now?

If we had to capture the year in a single word, it might be momentum.

Over the last 12 months we continued our quiet mission of making the web faster, cleaner, and less invasive — all while staying true to our privacy-respecting roots. The ad blocking landscape remains ever competitive, but we’re still here, still independent, and still growing.

Being an Apple Developer always comes with its contradictions — we love building on Apple platforms, but it’s not all sunshine and Xcode.

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (that happened last month), can sometimes feel like a looming stress beacon. This year, though, it actually brought some welcome clarity and relief.

Unlike last year, Apple’s lack of announcements that negatively impacted our business reinforced our confidence that the path we’re on is the right one.

Magic Lasso Adblock has now been a full-time focus for over two years. Enthusiasm for the product remains as strong as ever, and, perhaps more importantly, so does our user base:

👉 Over 350,000 downloads,
📈 Subscriber growth continues year-on-year, and
💸 Profit is up more than 30% compared to last year.

Focus or Diversification? (Yes.)

Running a small software business is always a balancing act: should we double down on what works or hedge our bets by diversifying into new areas?

This question has been top of mind all year. As we alluded to last year – with the potential of being ‘sherlocked’ looming – we needed to have a strategy in place to deal with it.

Our initial answer was to diversify.

Develop another app (or business), perhaps in a complimentary space, that would bring diversity to weather such a storm.

We’ve kept going back and forth, for many years, on doing such a thing. There’s many ideas for apps we could build, in spaces that are of keen interest, where we could make a positive impact.

But, the more we evaluated doing this, the more we realised it would take focus and time away from our core app, which is Magic Lasso Adblock. It never seemed like a smart use of time.

So instead, the decision we made was to focus — but to broaden our focus. That is, continue to invest heavily in our core ad blocking promise, while expanding the definition of what that promise includes.

Magic Lasso started as a Safari-only ad blocker. Over the past year, we’ve taken steps to grow that vision.

Last month we shipped the first results of this deeper focus — our v5.0 release. This introduced the new App Ad Blocking feature that extended Magic Lasso’s ad and tracker blocking to also work across all apps on the iPhone, iPad and Mac – not just in Safari.

This was just the start of delivering on our decision to broaden our focus. The result? A more useful, more complete Magic Lasso.

It should mean a better product, with a potentially larger customer base. A potentially true ‘win-win’.

Additionally, we’ve mapped out other diversification opportunities should the need arise, but for now, the strategy is: focus and evolve.

Upgrades and Behind-the-Scenes Improvements

2025 was our most productive year yet — packed with visible upgrades and behind-the-scenes improvements.

We shipped 11 app updates, each focused on better ad blocking or technical performance.

Smarter, Stronger Ad Blocking

This year’s standout features included:

App Ad Blocking – Ads and trackers can now be blocked across all apps, not just in Safari
Performance Improvements – Faster, leaner, and more reliable ad blocking
Adult Site Filtering – Better ad blocking for sensitive content
Regional Ad Blocking – More accurate blocking tailored to local and regional ads
Expanded Rules – We’ve more than doubled the number of blocking rules over the year and better precision means fewer empty ad spaces or broken pages

We also kept up a steady drumbeat of weekly rule updates, ensuring users always get the latest protections.

Behind the Scenes Technical Upgrades

Alongside user-facing features, we made major technical progress:

SwiftUI Migration – iOS and iPadOS are now both fully SwiftUI apps. Our macOS app is 95% SwiftUI, with final elements coming over the next few releases
Faster Architecture – Our rule update engine is now leaner, uses less memory and avoids unnecessary work
Performance Insights – Our performance monitoring system got a quiet refactor, lowering its memory footprint
YouTube Ad Blocking – We stayed on top of platform changes to keep blocking working as expected

All up, it was a big year — and one that sets the stage for even bigger things in the next 12 months.

Google Search Traffic, New Website and an Apple Search Ads Folly

Marketing had its highs and lows this year. From a massive spike in organic traffic and a fresh new website, to an underwhelming run with Apple Search Ads — we tried a lot.

Here’s how each channel performed, what worked, and what we won’t be repeating.

An Explosion of Google Search Traffic

After years of experimenting with content marketing, SEO, and the occasional blog post — Google finally found us.

In just six months, organic traffic jumped 560%. Turns out content marketing does work… it just took seven years to kick in.

We kept at it, publishing ten new articles over the past year.

The most engaging included:

It’s clear our writing is starting to connect — helping users and bringing fresh eyes to the app. Encouraged by the results, we’ll continue investing in thoughtful content and see where the momentum takes us.

New Website

We also launched a redesigned website, focused on communicating what we stand for: privacy-first, fast, and friendly ad blocking for Apple users.

It’s not flashy, but it does the job — and better reflects how far the app has come.

Are Apple Search Ads a Waste of Money?

What hasn’t worked? Well, we invested a lot in Apple Search Ads to make sure that potential ad blocking users could find our app on the App Store.

Despite managing to deliver a low cost-per-acquisition (CPA) on highly relevant keywords, the overall endeavour was a distraction and waste of time.

After a few months, with relatively high expenditure, an analysis showed that the customers acquired via this activity had terribly low conversion rates compared to customers coming from other channels. To the point that despite low keyword CPA, Apple Search Ads was a lot less profitable than other paid channels.

Despite hopefully thinking that Apple Search Ads may be a great way to grow an app business, it constantly disappoints.

If other indie app developers have had success or positive experiences – not VC funded businesses who can afford to spend marketing dollars inefficiently – we would love to hear from them.

In our experience, Apple Search Ads simply increases commissions paid to Apple for app distribution and has failed to deliver high quality potential customers.

Striving for 30% Growth

On the business side, we had a strong and stable year:

Profit was up over 30% year-over-year – meeting our stated goal from last years update
Subscriber base: growing, but slowly
Marketing spend: trimmed inefficiencies and reallocated spend to what works

There’s still plenty of room to grow, but we’ve built a solid and sustainable foundation.

Hitting the Subscription Growth Ceiling

Subscriber growth didn’t meet our hopes this year — but not for lack of trying. We’ve likely hit the point in our growth curve where new sign-ups are just balancing out subscriber churn.

It’s a natural stage for any subscription business, but a frustrating one nonetheless.

That said, we made progress. By cutting underperforming marketing and doubling down on what worked, we maintained steady new subscriber numbers while spending less overall.

Smarter, not louder.

Looking ahead, we’re continuing in that direction: tighter marketing budgets with the goal of steady acquisition. This should boost profitability, though we expect subscriber numbers to remain relatively flat.

To grow from here, we need to move the needle on either retention (already strong) or conversion. Both are tightly tied to product value.

So in the year ahead, we’re focusing on just that — making the app better and the ad blocking experience even more seamless. We’ll check back next year to see how it’s paying off.

Grow, Baby, Grow!

Last year our stated financial goal was to hit 30% profit growth. We managed to exceed that (just).

Ever the lovers of habit, we’re going to set the same financial goal for the next 12 months.

To hit 30% profit growth.

As the business matures, it becomes increasingly more difficult to hit these growth figures. However based upon our forecasts – and the future product roadmap – 30% profit growth for at least another year should be achievable.

Let’s Keep Going

Our main goal for the next 12 months is simple: keep going.

For any startup or indie business, that’s no small feat.

The last 12 months gave us clarity — and a renewed belief in the value of staying focused. By doubling down on our strengths and broadening what Magic Lasso Adblock can do, we shipped meaningful improvements, grew our reach, and laid the groundwork for even more to come.

There’s still plenty of work ahead. Subscription growth remains a challenge, and we know the market will keep shifting — as it always does. But we’ve built a product we’re proud of, a business that’s sustainable, and a direction that feels right.

We’ll continue to refine and expand Magic Lasso’s core features while pushing gently into new spaces — especially where we can bring ad blocking to more parts of the Apple ecosystem.

No pivots. No distractions. Just a continued focus on making the internet cleaner, lighter, and more private — one year at a time.