You’ve probably had the experience of visiting a site like Reddit or LinkedIn on your iPhone and being greeted with an annoying, almost full-screen pop-up window urging to view content in their app rather than on the site.
For websites that have a companion iOS app, it is common practice to push users to open (if they have the app installed) or download their app from the App Store to view the content they are trying to view. However, this can be very annoying to end users as these pop-ups are often quite intrusive to the reading of the actual content, creating a subpar experience.
Thankfully, there is a new way to block these pop-ups in the Safari browser for iPhones and iPad. Developer Alex Zamoshchin has created a new Safari extension called “Banish” that works on iOS and iPadOS and is designed specifically to get rid of these pop-ups. The $2 app helps eliminate most pop-ups in popular web-based apps, but it doesn’t get rid of similar banners that show up at the top of the Safari browser and suggests opening the current page in an installed app.
The banners at the top of Safari are built into Safari and WebKit itself, so to get rid of these you have to uninstall the corresponding app from your device. Instead, Banish gets rid of the pop-ups implemented on the website itself.
To use Banish, download the app from the App Store and follow the on-screen instructions to give the app the required permission in Settings, Safari and Extensions.
