The popular ad-blocking extension, UBlock Origin is still available on Chrome Web Store, but the upcoming version may not be available or extension won’t be updated in future as RC1 build of same has been rejected by Chrome Web Store team by citing it as “bundling unrelated functionality” which users need to accept, they told the extension did not comply with their program policies and hence removed from the Store.
UPDATE October 13 , 2019: Chrome Web Store team has approved the latest UBO dev build and is now available on store.
A few days back, UBO developer, Raymond Hill or also known as gorhill, published an email he received from the CWS team. The email conveys UBlock Origin development build with so and so ID submitted for approval into Store ” did not comply with our policies and was removed from the Google Chrome Web Store.”
The email states the reason
An extension should have a single purpose that is clear to users. Do not create an extension that requires users to accept bundles of unrelated functionality, such as an email notifier and a news headline aggregator. If two pieces of functionality are clearly separate, they should be put into two different extensions, and users should have the ability to install and uninstall them separately.
Gorhil re-submitted RC2 of the same build with a reply “there are no bundles of unrelated functionality in UBlock Origin”, but received the same response and he now feels “UBO is probably coming to end of life in Chrome Web Store”. The author says submitting the same version by changing the version number as 1.23.0. may not work, which means it could well be rejected as well.
FYI, current UBO stable version number is 1.22.4, the RC2 of next UBO version of 1.22.5 has been rejected, means, the extension will remain on 1.22.4 until CWS accepts the next version, if that will be the case, you may want to install Ublock Origin (Nik Rolls) available on Microsoft Edge insider add-ons page or switch to Firefox.
In case you don’t know, Google announced in 2013 that extensions on Chrome Web Store must have a single purpose. In these six years, Google hasn’t objected to UBO, now it is not accepting. What could’ve gone wrong?
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The problem is resolved, ublock is on Chrome Web Store
Yep, we’ve updated the article already with that message.