What would be your recommendation for blocking ads on an android phone? Do you use one and, if so, what’s your 2 cents on what you’re using? Where have you seen the biggest improvement (reduction) if it works well?
personaldnsfilter (yes, in a single word): https://github.com/IngoZenz/personaldnsfilter It can use Hagezi lists (an many more), is free and open source.
NextDNS can provide a similar experience to adaway and similar apps, but without needing an app and with no need to constantly manage anything or ensure an app is running or whatever, it just always works.
Not open source though, but the free plan is more than enough for a single person on all their devices, so for a single phone it should work.
OS ads, website ads or app ads?
- For OS ads, it depends on the manufacturer. Some don’t have ads. For Xiaomi devices, ads can be completely removed by disabling a single app. Avoid anything by Samsung.
- For ads on websites, use Firefox with uBlock.
- App ads are the hardest to remove. You can try blocking ad domains at the OS level, or disable ads in each app’s settings (if they give you that option).
Firefox Mobile with uBlock Origin extension. YouTube ReVanced For other apps: Some VPNs are also blocking Ads and Trackers. Proton for example.
If you are rooted adaway works great
Yeah im not quite sure what OP is going for here. Without root you wont be able to block ads system wide.
that’s not true, you can block them with a VPN. or if you have one set up, a Pihole works even better. I haven’t seen an ad in any android app in years.
Simply looking to see what methods people here use to reduce ads. I’ve not gotten into advanced user access with my phone though.
I don’t install any app that has ads, to the extent that I even uninstalled Google Maps and became a pariah that has no Whatsapp. Most apps are from f-droid, I use OSMAND~ from f-droid, Firefox with ublock origin to browse and pipepipe as youtube client. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad on this phone and that’s how I like it.
adaway is the best one, and now supports unrooted phones.
I use wgtunnel to stay connected to my home network to take advantage of dns filtering. Also have ublock origin installed in firefox mobile. Most of the activity is from blocking telemetry. The majority of apps I use on a daily basis are foss and the rare play store app is either a paid game or an app for a service like uber.
If you’re not selfhosting, using one of the online options will probably work just as well.
i use personaldnsfilter for adblocking on android
it uses VPN to block domains, you can modify the host file, and it works all the time
I’ve been using this for years, love it
Not seeing my particular setup listed yet. Morphe and Firefox with ublock of course. But I also have a pihole running at home and a tailscale connection with the pihole configured as DNS. So I have pihole blocking even on my mobile data connection.
Tailscale was initially setup so I can access Actual Budget when not on my LAN, but pihole on the go is definitely a big plus.
I tried that (tailscale -> pi-hole) but experienced terrible lag and drop-outs while surfing on mobile, probably due to the raspberry pi being overloaded or more likely my son playing Fortnite and saturating the connection
There are public DNS servers that can filter for you. Control D and Adguard.
I don’t get why people recommend PiHole.
My DNS filters most of it.
Google always finds a way to bypass adblocking. What worked for me is using firefox with ublock origin. And using apps that don’t have ads in the first place. There are many apps like this on F-droid.
I use TrackerControl for trackers in apps (and as others said Firefox+uBO, NewPipe for Youtube)
For me, the best bang for your buck as far as effort was to just set the DNS Provider to dns.adguard.com. Then use whatever adblocker or vpn solution you want on top of that. Has worked pretty well for me.
This a million times ^
Combine that with FF and UBO and I almost never see an ad.
I can’t recommend this highly enough, there is one caveat though- it may break some links or hotel wifi login portals. Not a big deal, just switch it off for a second and reload the page, login, and then turn it back on. It’s a quick 30s process to cycle it off so it’s a non issue for me.
What ads are you trying to remove?
For a browser, I use FireFox mobile with the uBlock Origin and NoScript extensions. Those two eliminate most ads while browsing, though NoScript does require extra effort to allow some pages to function.
For games and other apps, I try to stick to stuff which doesn’t have ads. This usually means paying for the stuff you use or sticking to pure open-source solutions. However, I still have some apps which have ads. For that there I use PiHole as a DNS at home, which eliminates most of them.I could probably do more to avoid the few ads I do see, but at some point I just accept that advertisement is an inevitable consequence of our economy and just move on with life.
