Best Way to Block Ads and Trackers on Your Device

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I saw many people on Reddit asking ways to block ads. There are many ways to do that. Let’s discuss the most common methods and, at last, the method that I recommend for everyone.

  1. Ad Blocker Apps- There are many famous Ad Blocker Apps that use VPN Profile to block ads. The most common apps are- AdGuard, Blokada, Adaway, RethinkDNS etc. These apps are very good. but issue with these types is that they drain battery. RethinkDNS, AdAway are open Source.

  2. Personal AdBlock- There are many privacy-conscious people who suggest building a personal Ad Block on Raspberry pi with Pi-hole. You can Block ads on your all connected devices with same WiFi. This method is bulletproof. The only issue is, setup requires some time, money and some coding knowledge.

  3. Changing DNS- My recommended method for all the common folks out there. There are two ways you can do this.

  • The Easy Way- Go to Settings > Network and Internet > Private DNS > select Private DNS Provider Hostname > enter “dns.adguard.com”.
    This is AdGuard Adblock DNS. With it, you’ll see 99% drop in ads. Most of you can use this method. But I’m not sure if this blocks Trackers present in all apps.

  • The Hard Way- I use this one. It’s not hard per-se, just slightly complicated than previous one. This is with Next DNS. Sign Up on NextDNS. Then on the Security and Privacy page you can tweak what things you want to block. Best thing is you can block all Amazon, Apple, Google trackers there. And you can see it live which sites are getting blocked at Log page.
    To block with Next DNS, on the Setup page copy the “DNS Over TLS/QUIC” link and paste on your Private DNA Hostname mentioned as above.

The only issue is, NextDNS provide 300k queries per month. But with my testing, it’s more than enough for a single device.

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Adguard license was money well spent in my experience.

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dns.adguard-dns.com is the newer DNS over TLS resolver.

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Hey you should edit that link to nextdns. You left in a typo which leads you to a fake virus scam website instead of nextdns.

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wanted to add to this, someone made a great tool on GitHub to test your adblocker
https://d3ward.github.io/toolz/adblock

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Oracle Cloud free tier running Pihole and Wireguard, cost nothing but a bit of setup time, which wasn’t all that hard.

There’s plenty of how-tos online, for Oracle, Google Cloud and other free ones.

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Method 2 requires that you always connect through that Pi. Kinda hard to do that out and about unless you VPN back home, in which case you may as well just use method 1.

Method 3 “easy way” was what I was doing before. And I’d semi-randomly get a “can’t reach DNS” error and no internet connectivity until I toggled my wifi connection off, or if I was already on cellular reset my DNS to anything other than “private”.

I’m using method 1 now, with PersonalDNSFilter.

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Also: base.dns.mullvad.net

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I use an app called Private DNS Quick Toggle for my phone when I’m away from the house to change my DNS to AdAway and pihole for when I’m home

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I have pihole set up at home and Tailscale lets me use it as my DNS even when I’m away from home with the easiest setup I could imagine. I even got my wife and kids phones on my tailnet so they have it too without having to think about it, and without disrupting their normal Internet access.

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Thank you for posting this. It’s mostly Greek to me, but I intend to give it a bash.

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You have to be rooted or jailbroken if you disable these services your phone won’t function right and they’ve all got super user elevated system privileges in the name of needed system functionality services to spy i mean to improve their apps same thing with all the virus research everything from AIDS to all these flus to covid they weaponize these things and by the way the drug pandemic all the drugs come from big Pharma and covid and the opioid pandemic are both full circle from the 1970s but people have forgotten because they’re so busy in life in the pursuit of money and because they put fluoride in the water and it dums us down and makes us angry and uncontrollable ADHD is about not being able to control your emotions if you control the money which is the oil you can control a country if you control the food you will control the people they know this they do science and chemistry to analyze everything in life we’re like their experiments they tested on us first and then they try to use it to take out another country in a war a silent war a black op like operation Northwoods what you better believe it get ready.

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Is there a way to run blokada and VPN simultaneously on an Android phone? Currently I have close one of the apps to use the other one.

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I use an alternative dns* to block ads and the Duckduckgo app to block trackers.

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100% agree. I bought the lifetime license so anytime I get a new device I just transfer it over on the website. Easy to do

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I got the lifetime for a few bucks, it is amazing

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Haha sorry for my mistake… Fixed.

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How’s the latency with your setup? And the uptime?

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Yes I get that error too. I found an easy way there. I use Private DNS Quick Toggle app for that. It adds a quick toggle tile. Just click it, the DNS turns off and another click, it turns on.

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Also I see you’re using OP 12. I just ordered it a few days back, haven’t received it yet. How’s the phone? Worth buying?