Trackers Away - Mac OS Ads Blocker - releasing 1.0.3 and road map

Trackers Away is inspired by Ads Away which is an easy to use Android Ads Blocker.

To Install Trackers Away brew install tim-hub/trackers-away/trackers-away

6 Months ago, I published the Trackers Away pre-release at Reddit. 79% up-voted, and about 70 downloads.. Going through the Reddit discussion, many people seems not understanding well why a hosts manager like Trackers Away can help to protect your privacy. The way of a hosts file works is to have a list of domain to IP, that all of your requests, all of them before going to DNS, it will check `hosts` file.

If the IP for the domain name is mapping to 127.0.0.1, the request will not sent out through internet, this is Blocking, and this is why we call it an ads blocker, it blocks ads requests through updating and adding the ads and trackers domain to the hosts file.
In some cases, the domain name might be mapping to a a real IP address, this can help you to speed up, many people are using this way to visit Google and bypassing the DNS provider.

On Linux/Mac, it is /etc/hosts, a plain text file while record are separated by new line.

Trackers Away is using a well maintained hosts list from S tevenBlack / hosts, you can go through it to know more about how it works and how it gets updated.

StevenBlack hosts + Trackers Away can easily help you to block a lot of malware, honeypot and ads website.

Roadmap of Trackers Away

enable to custom list of source hosts list.
re-design UI, read and get some inspiration from <Refactor UI> and ask some suggestions from designer friends.
more stars and watchers then publish on homebrew cask repo.
marketing and audience
- reddit
- hacker news
- indie hacker
- facebook/wechat/v2ex some social network