Block Ads in Apps on Android • Hacker News Board

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#41

Post by Fnoord » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 3:59 PM UTC

alias_neo wrote: post #34

Fnoord wrote: post #12

I'm using Pi-Hole on an Ubiquiti router together with WireGuard and DNSSEC. My Synology NAS is backup (with regards to the DNS-based Pi-Hole blocking) taking the adblocking load off the router (there's no redundancy for WireGuard endpoint though). I don't (need) to use a RPi anymore. It works extremely well for me, and all my clients also get to connect to Nextcloud running on the Synology. My setup does far more tha…

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. Same with audio (albeit through Spotify Premium). So with most of my video and audio synced up locally (and the same's true with regards to recent Nextcloud pictures) I end up with mainly traditional websites or apps or an OS/application update or so.

That being said, have you attempted to discuss the issue with them? Have you considered a non-default UDP port? Also, did you compare the usage with OpenVPN? I ran OpenVPN before, the roaming, network speed, and latency is quite terrible.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#42

Post by pieter_mj » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

Forbo wrote: post #25

tobib wrote: post #18

> This is a free, open source app. Open source is important here because all your network requests will go through this app, and we need to make sure we can trust it. Because the app is open source, if it was doing anything shady, it would be found out. That's the statement that always bothers me because it's only true if you build the app yourself. This is giving people a simplistic view and a false sense of securit…

If it's available on F-Droid, it can support reproducible builds, so that's at least one defense against it. https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds/

Yes it's available on F-Droid (see comment# https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19208623), but currently I have a slight preference for Blokada.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#43

Post by StreakyCobra » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #26

I wish the play store would just let me filter based on app intrusiveness. Let me find things that don't use ads, don't have in-app purchases, and don't collect data. Looking at "paid" apps is NOT equivalent. Then I can maybe read reviews and get what I want. Once the quality bar has been raised I don't have any problem paying a few bucks (or more) for an app that behaves the way I want.

You can use Yalp Store [1]. It allows to search and filter Google Play Store apps based on (i) Apps with ads, (ii) Paid apps and (iii) Apps using GSF.

Another reflex is to look on the F-Droid Store if an equivalent FOSS application exists before looking for one in the Google Play Store. There are some excellent apps there, such as NewPipe [2] for instance!

[1] https://github.com/yeriomin/YalpStore

[2] https://newpipe.schabi.org/

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#44

Post by lotsofpulp » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 4:02 PM UTC

gesman wrote: post #19

Anything like possible on iPhone?

I use 1Blocker X and don't see any ads.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#45

Post by kayone » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 4:02 PM UTC

jandeboevrie wrote: post #23

Even at night when you don't use your phone, you are tracked and served ads. I use blokada and it blocks over 5000 ads and trackers in three days, 12 hours of effective usage, meaning 400+ ads/h: https://raymii.org/s/blog/My_phone_serves_me_400_ads_per_hou... Blokada is easier to use that dns66, just one big button and you're done. It doesn't require root, but just like this app uses a local vpn (on the device itself…

which filters do you use? I tried for so long to get youtube ads to block and at the end, I just gave up.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#46

Post by cheald » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

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.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#47

Post by fulafel » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 4:08 PM UTC

So this is a userspace app that reconstitutes the VPN encapsulated datagrams into outgoing networking socket API calls, a bit like slirp in ye olde days? I can't imagine this process is very lossless, does it really properly handle multicast, ipv6, protocols other than tcp and udp, etc?

edit: apparently, the Android VPN is flexible enough that they can direct only DNS traffic through this process, which mitigates it quite a bit. This issue has some tech details: https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66/issues/193

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#48

Post by towb » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

When it's between 10+ ads per hour or very expensive monthly premium for a pretty bad but addictive game, this is at least a battery saver.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#49

Post by hivacruz » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 4:18 PM UTC

kayone wrote: post #45

jandeboevrie wrote: post #23

Even at night when you don't use your phone, you are tracked and served ads. I use blokada and it blocks over 5000 ads and trackers in three days, 12 hours of effective usage, meaning 400+ ads/h: https://raymii.org/s/blog/My_phone_serves_me_400_ads_per_hou... Blokada is easier to use that dns66, just one big button and you're done. It doesn't require root, but just like this app uses a local vpn (on the device itself…

which filters do you use? I tried for so long to get youtube ads to block and at the end, I just gave up.

Youtube ads are hard to block. Use NewPipe to watch videos there

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#50

Post by AdmiralAsshat » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 4:19 PM UTC

Has anyone done testing to see what having an always-on VPN for adblocking does to battery usage?

Also, I have an actual VPN for my Android phone that I turn on whenever I'm on coffee shop wifi, so it seems like it would be impossible to have both running at once.