iOS 18 has fulfilled my dream of destroying ads with a Thanos snap

Not a day goes by without me getting frustrated at the state of the mobile web. I rarely use my iPhone to read news articles now because every time I do there’s a cookie prompt obstructing what I want to read, or so many ads on a page that I can’t even see the text anymore.

Apple is clearly just as frustrated as I am, so it’s added a Thanos snap animation to iOS 18 that wipes out annoying parts of websites.

The new “Distraction Control” feature showed up in Safari earlier this week in the fifth beta of iOS 18 and iPadOS18. It’s designed to let you temporarily remove annoying and distracting elements from a mobile website, including cookie prompts, ads, those infuriating autoplay videos that follow you around while you scroll a site, and more.

The animation is a beautiful nod to the Thanos snap, and it certainly feels like I’m wielding all six Infinity Stones and snapping my fingers to exterminate half of the crap that exists on mobile websites these days. I also don’t feel guilty about it. This isn’t an adblocker, so it’s only temporary and nothing persists. You still load up the ads so the website owner gets an ad view, no harm done.

MacRumors has a great hands-on video demonstrating how it all works, but I just wish there was an easier way of using Distraction Control. In the latest iOS 18 beta 5 release you have to tap on the same button you’d use to enable the reader mode — which also lets you focus in on text on a website — to be able to hide parts of webpages. If there was a gesture to swipe these annoying ads away then that would make this even more useful.

Unless Apple does some last minute changes to iOS 18, this new Distraction Control feature should arrive as part of the final iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 release, likely to arrive next month.