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

Not a day goes by that I don’t get frustrated with 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 warning obstructing what I want to read, or there are so many ads on a page that I can’t even see the text anymore.

Apple is clearly as frustrated as I am, so it added a Thanos hover animation to iOS 18 that eliminates annoying parts of websites.

The new “Distraction Control” feature appeared 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 warnings, ads, those annoying auto-playing videos that follow you around as you browse a website, and more.

The animation is a nice nod to Thanos’ snap, and it certainly feels like I’m wielding all six Infinity Stones and snapping my fingers to exterminate half the crap that exists on mobile sites these days. I don’t feel guilty about it either. This is not an ad blocker, so it is only temporary and nothing persists. You still load the ads so the site owner can see the ad without causing any harm.

MacRumors There is a great practical video demonstrating how it all works, but I just wish there was an easier way to use Distraction Control. In the latest version of iOS 18 beta 5, you need to tap the same button you would use to activate reader mode – which also lets you focus on text on a website – to be able to hide parts of web pages. If there was a gesture to remove these annoying ads, that would make this even more useful.

Unless Apple makes some last-minute changes to iOS 18, this new distraction control feature should arrive as part of the final release of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, which will likely arrive next month.