Block Blast quietly rigs games to serve you a lethal puzzle when a high-paying ad is ready
How Block Blast harvests its players for ad money
A reverse-engineering breakdown of Block Blast, which earned an estimated $127 million from ads between January and May 2026. The Android app ships almost no game logic: on launch, a server config assigns each player hundreds of downloadable JavaScript modules that decide scoring, difficulty and ads. One module waits until you've watched three rewarded ads, are 1,000 points past your high score, and a loaded ad is worth 3.5 times your last one — then deals a puzzle that cannot be solved, pushing you toward a revive.
Two of the three fit when they're dealt, so the hand doesn't look impossible until you try it.
- jstanley
This is really interesting but I wish LLMs wrote text that was a bit easier to understand.
> It requests the lethal puzzle exactly when all three conditions hold: 28 cases, including two ads instead of three, one ad closed early, a score 1 point short, and an ad worth just under 3.5×.
> Then we ran it live, in a test copy of the iPhone app running in Apple’s simulator, and read the rule’s inputs while we played. It had three good rewarded ads on record. The score was past the line. A rewarded ad from Google AdMob was loaded and ready. The rule priced it at 72.39, against 37.41 for the last one, which is 1.94 times. It needs 3.5. So on iPhone the rule is live, reading real ad prices, and waiting for an ad worth 3.5 times your last one.
What on earth is this supposed to mean?
- jwr
I think it is so sad that humanity puts so much effort into things like this.
I thought by the 2020s we would have fusion power, and be busy exploring and colonizing space.
Instead, we got greedy corporations with moral-free executives (remember the "don't be evil" declarations? good times, huh) and incredible amounts of developer effort being poured into useless garbage.
- noisy_boy
I play block blast classic mode with adguard and don't see any ads.
- Jaxkr
The fact that impossible puzzles are generated to bait rewarded-ad views is something I've always suspected in mobile games, but I dismissed it as a skill issue on my end.
- quikoa
> Apple does let apps download JavaScript updates like this, which is how tools like Expo Updates work, as long as the update doesn’t change what the app is. Whether changing your pieces based on ad prices fits that is up to Apple.
But there is no way for Apple to verify "as long as the update doesn’t change what the app is" right?