The most popular web extensions are those that deprive sites of direct and indirect revenue, which necessarily means they can’t charge for the service or their userbase would revolt and steal their rule sets (which is easy to do for a web extension). Having to pay money for such things goes against the grain of those users, and the sort of breakage that people think is acceptable for content blockers isn’t quite as acceptable in the wider Safari userbase as it is for the pi-hole folks. Imagine pi-hole charging a monthly subscription or else it allows ads through, and you can see immediately why this category is dead on arrival in revenue terms.
And, for the content blocker extensions market, there’s essentially no point in releasing it as a paid web extension for iOS/macOS users, because there’s already better paid app competitors that do this, like 1Blocker or Guardian VPN or etc, that are full native apps on the platform with the appropriate hooks to be performant and such.
Therefore: What valuable browser extension ideas other than content blockers exist, that could have any significant user base and value, that isn’t already met by better and more capable native apps on macOS and iOS, and somehow could charge people money for the extension with their willing cooperation? They’d obviously have to use a subscription model, so factor that into consideration when assessing the market.
I’m unable to come up with anything that would make this segment of the App Store market worth my time to invest code into, and I already have a developer account for other reasons, so I don’t even have the annual fee barrier to consider. I remain hopeful that I’m wrong, but no one’s made a convincing argument yet. Prove me wrong, HN.
(I see most people taking the “wrap WebKit” route instead, which makes more sense since it provides the capabilities an extension can’t offer, and is dead simple by virtue of the platform’s capabilities. Makes more sense to me, anyways, and then too. So: now what?)