Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Block Ads in Apps on Android

unlikekinds.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 150 posts

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#101

Post by alias_neo »

Fnoord wrote: post #41
alias_neo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting you've found the WireGuard experience to be "seamless". I have a WireGuard VPN at home and experimented with always-on, on my Android phone. Unfortunately, my provider (EE, UK) throttles UDP traffic something rotten, and my normally great experience with 50/50Mb+ is severly limited to between 0 and 10 Mb making my phone almost unusable by normal standards. Does your LTE provider not throttle this way…

On the 2 SIM cards I have (Vodafone NL and KPN NL) they don't throttle, as that's illegal, but the plans have data limits (after the limit they just disable 4G for you) and perhaps they do some QoS though. Public WiFi I mainly use Dutch railways (NS) in trains which uses T-Mobile NL. You (or well, anyone, AFAIK) cannot use that to watch on-demand movies though. But I just have that kind of material synced up locally.…

I ran some tests with the guys in WireGuard IRC which seemed to confirm that the issue is specifically EE limiting UDP whether by QoS or otherwise.

I haven't contacted EE about it or tested other VPNs yet. I want to run WireGuard for various reasons so switching to OpenVPN might confirm they issue but not solve my problems (I don't run the VPN for the reasons in the OP)

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#102

Post by alias_neo »

dspillett wrote: post #63
alias_neo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting you've found the WireGuard experience to be "seamless". I have a WireGuard VPN at home and experimented with always-on, on my Android phone. Unfortunately, my provider (EE, UK) throttles UDP traffic something rotten, and my normally great experience with 50/50Mb+ is severly limited to between 0 and 10 Mb making my phone almost unusable by normal standards. Does your LTE provider not throttle this way…

> Unfortunately, my provider (EE, UK) throttles UDP traffic something rotten Interesting. I've not noticed performance issues beyond those expected due to signal quality when using work's VPN over a tethered phone using EE. That VPN is using OpenVPN with a UDP transport. Then again it doesn't get used for anything with high throughput so perhaps they only throttle when it looks like bulk transfers are happening or th…

I don't run my VPN for ad-blocking (my phone is rooted), I use it for more traditional access reasons.

To copy and paste another reply I just made:

"I ran some tests with the guys in WireGuard IRC which seemed to confirm that the issue is specifically EE limiting UDP whether by QoS or otherwise."

I'll give OpenVPN a go over TCP once I have a chance to set it up and I might even consider contacting EE for info.

I would mind the fact that it limits my throughout to, at best 12Mb down, but when on WG it typically approaches 0 making my device unusable and I've already ruled out the rest of my network.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#103

Post by Forbo »

on_and_off wrote: post #99

>It's important that free apps continue to be made, and app developers need money to go on doing what they do. So if you can't stand ads in your apps, try to support them in another way, by making a donation or paying a few bucks for the full version of their app. It feels more than a little disingenuous to post that at the end of a post explaining how to cut the revenue source of devs. If you don't want ads, how abo…

Because paying for something doesn't necessarily mean that they won't continue to use your information in the surveillance economy. You might not see ads anymore, but that doesn't mean that they're respecting your privacy.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#105

Post by vvanders »

michaelmrose wrote: post #98
vvanders wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side I've got 4 different devices across 3 operating systems, but putting it at the DNS layer it just works. FWIW I've been running pihole for almost a year, aside from the issue with Burrow and some social media redirect links used to track(that I want to block) I've not had any other false positives.

Firefox + ublock origin works on mac/windows/linux/android/bsd/some more unusual OS On almost any machine you could have save for ios.

Yeah, and as much as I love Firefox, the android implementation just isn't up to the level to where I can use it as a daily driver.

I've got nothing against browser blockers, I just prefer something that works in a unified way as a network policy.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#106

Post by sandov »

d2p wrote: post #95

> Because the app is open source, if it was doing anything shady, it would be found out This is a little misleading... Just because there is source code on GitHub does not mean the random APK you're downloading from the internet and side-loading is safe. If you're paranoid (and you probably should be - if I was a bad person and wanted to get malware onto your machines, I'd be making some useful "open source" app and…

To be honest, most people wouldn't even bother to know if it was open source, they would install it anyway. Actually most people probably don't know what "open source" means.

It would work against the HN crowd though.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#107

Post by HenryBemis »

cheald wrote: post #46

On Android 9, you can do this even more easily: Settings -> Network & Internet -> Advanced -> Private DNS -> set provider hostname to "dns.adguard.com" Adguard functionally operates similar to a Pihole install - it just maintains a DNS-based blacklist. You give them your DNS queries, of course, but in return you get an almost entirely ad-free experience with just one setting.

The solution I follow on all my Android devices is the "NoRoot Firewall", free, no ads. I use it either to block IPs/addresses I "don't like" or global block sites/IPs like Google analytics, Facebook etc.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#108

Post by alias_neo »

Fnoord wrote: post #91
jeroenhd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, there are actually networks that throttle certain kinds of traffic. For example, on the WiFi on Blauwnet trains I can connect to my OpenVPN server but WireGuard just doesn't seem to make it through. I assume this is because of a combination of unknown ports + UDP + uncommon protocols. I think the trick to bypass this kind of nonsense is to use port 443/1194/53 so QoS + firewall rules will still allo…

> Sadly, you won't be able to use QUIC or HTTP3 if you do, but I don't think that's much of an issue these days. Should still be possible. Xs4all had port 80 set up so that if you'd SSH to it, you'd get connected to their shell while with a browser (the normal modus operandi) you'd end up on their website. It worked very well in some of the more oppressive regimes where traffic to port 22 was blocked. I also don't se…

Indeed this, I only host WireGuard and now you mention it, it'd only take me a second to switch the WireGuard port to 443 or something to test the port theory.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#110

Post by eropple »

vvanders wrote: post #105
michaelmrose wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox + ublock origin works on mac/windows/linux/android/bsd/some more unusual OS On almost any machine you could have save for ios.

Yeah, and as much as I love Firefox, the android implementation just isn't up to the level to where I can use it as a daily driver. I've got nothing against browser blockers, I just prefer something that works in a unified way as a network policy.

What's not up to par for you? Before I went back to iOS (where I use 1Blocker as a content blocker for Safari), Firefox for Android plus uBlock Origin did pretty well for me.
Post reply on HN