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Block Ads in Apps on Android

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Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#81

Post by Fnoord »

DFXLuna wrote: post #76
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…

I've been considering setting up pihole on my home server for a while but I've always been worried that it would break a website for a non-technical family member while I wasn't there to fix it. How has your experience with website breakage been? Also, how has your experience with wire guard been? I've been using my vpn's default client on all my individual devices out of convenience but after looking at the wire gua…

My partner sometimes has a website which breaks, especially when she's shopping online. Which you could consider a Good Thing. For me, the website which breaks is AliExpress. Specifically, the pictures don't load. Quad9 by default also blocks porn websites. For me, that's intentional, but YMMV.

My experience with WireGuard has been fantastic. The configuration is straightforward (way less complex than OpenVPN), wg-quick(8) is ace, the macOS and Android UIs work very well. The performance is great (both throughput and latency, even of the userspace ports). You only need very minimal, basic knowledge about networking and public key cryptography.

I got some minor complaints. For example the VPN is gone on Android when the app gets updated, and there's no official Windows client (though I don't use Windows right now). The EdgeOS port is sometimes out-of-date but its made by a 3rd party. And, compared to ZeroTier (where I was coming from) I miss out on a nice website configuration, but I get back a CLI one.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#82

Post by pimeys »

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…

I'm using Pi-Hole in a lxc-container on a Omnia Turris router, blokada for my Android phone with uBlock Origin, Firefox with uBlock Origin on every computer I own and the router encrypts all traffic with WireGuard to several different endpoints for the whole network. Having a bit too slow uplink to connect to the internal network from outside.

It starts to be really easy to setup all of this so that it just works.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#83

Post by ignoramous »

I posted a comment on how to do this (without requiring root or installing 3p apps for Android 4 and above) here on a HN thread on AdGuard DNS.

Copy-paste from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18788410

For anyone running on Android 9 or later, navigate to

Settings -> WiFi and Internet -> Private DNS

Select Private DNS provider hostname

Add dns.adguard.com (DNS over TLS)

Click save.

Visit https://segment.com and you should see browser's 'Server not found' (disable existing ad-blockers or they might jump in and block the website anyway).

---

For anyone on Android 4.0 or later, consider using Intra [0] to use AdGuard DNS over HTTPS, if you prefer it over cloudflare's or google's.

Install Intra.

Open the app, click on Settings.

Choose customer URL and paste: https://dns.adguard.com/dns-query

Be sure to 'lock the app' to prevent it from being killed in the background, and enable 'Auto Start' for the app from installed apps settings page if on newer android versions that support it.

[0] https://getintra.org

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#84

Post by kfwhp »

Zizizizz wrote: post #80
4mitkumar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasted almost an hour trying unsuccessfully to book a cab using Uber yesterday only to realise it was 1.1.1.1 in my Private DNS which was the problem. I had internet access just fine (browsers) but Signal, Google Maps, Uber and Ola just wouldn't work with 1.1.1.1. Haven't gotten around to think about the reason

instead of 1.1.1.1 use 1dot1dot1dot1.cloudflare-dns.com

Wait, how are you supposed to use a host name as a DNS server?

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#85

Post by gattilorenz »

trishmapow2 wrote: post #14
gattilorenz wrote: post #2

Another alternative, on a rooted phone, is AdAway, which can be obtained on F-Droid ( https://f-droid.org/en/ ). I'm more than satisfied with it.

Which filter lists do you use? I find a few ads still get through on the default settings.

https://pastebin.com/raw/L0011N6C

Although to be honest I also use the Brave browser,so that might explain why I have so few ads when browsing. Yeah, I really hate them...

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#86

Post by gammateam »

reads article to see anything has changed since 2014

VPN and host file?

In my apps I would just check the host file or ping a certain address to detect if a user was doing this

I would then serve a different kind of ad, shrug emoji

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#87

Post by jeroenhd »

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.…

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 allow the VPN to pass through.

Haven't tested it yet, but in my experience non-default ports only make the problem worse. Most filtering/QoS services are pretty dumb and will just match source and destination ports; most firewalls will just plain ignore everything targeted at port 443 because the moment you start messing with HTTPS, you're in for a world of pain. Because WireGuard uses UDP, it's possible to listen on port 443 even if you're already hosting an HTTPS website. 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.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#88

Post by vvanders »

DFXLuna wrote: post #76
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…

I've been considering setting up pihole on my home server for a while but I've always been worried that it would break a website for a non-technical family member while I wasn't there to fix it. How has your experience with website breakage been? Also, how has your experience with wire guard been? I've been using my vpn's default client on all my individual devices out of convenience but after looking at the wire gua…

The only site I've seen break was Burrow ironically enough, couldn't get through the checkout flow which is pretty darn stupid for a purchased product.

Our solution is simple, we've got two SSIDs, one w/ PH, one without. They route to separate VLANs and each VLAN uses a different gateway+DHCP with pihole or standard DNS. Fixing a website that doesn't work is simple as hopping over on another SSID.

We're using UniFi gear for the wifi, they support 4 SSIDs(8 if you split 2.4/5Ghz) per access point and USG made it trivial to setup multiple gateways(now on pfSense but that's a whole nother discussion).

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#89

Post by michaelmrose »

vvanders wrote: post #88
DFXLuna wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been considering setting up pihole on my home server for a while but I've always been worried that it would break a website for a non-technical family member while I wasn't there to fix it. How has your experience with website breakage been? Also, how has your experience with wire guard been? I've been using my vpn's default client on all my individual devices out of convenience but after looking at the wire gua…

The only site I've seen break was Burrow ironically enough, couldn't get through the checkout flow which is pretty darn stupid for a purchased product. Our solution is simple, we've got two SSIDs, one w/ PH, one without. They route to separate VLANs and each VLAN uses a different gateway+DHCP with pihole or standard DNS. Fixing a website that doesn't work is simple as hopping over on another SSID. We're using UniFi g…

Regarding the web, browser based blocking still makes more sense. If I have 2 tabs one which works with adblock and one which does not I can simply click an icon to enable ads on the one. Changing networks seems like a pain in the neck.

Re: Block Ads in Apps on Android

#90

Post by fxfan »

4mitkumar wrote: post #59
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.

I wasted almost an hour trying unsuccessfully to book a cab using Uber yesterday only to realise it was 1.1.1.1 in my Private DNS which was the problem. I had internet access just fine (browsers) but Signal, Google Maps, Uber and Ola just wouldn't work with 1.1.1.1. Haven't gotten around to think about the reason

Thats cloudflare not adguard. I'm surprised about your problem
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