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Comment by androidgirl | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic, but if you're okay with a bit of setup, there's a cool F-Droid app called Blokada that's like a personal pi-hole.

I had an issue where my firefox browser was great, but the other apps on my phone were extremely noisy with ad networks. This would compliment an ad blocked Brave/Firefox browser nicely.

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Super! Thanks. For reference:

https://github.com/blokadaorg/blokada https://blokada.org

I second this. I've tried Blokada and DNS66 via F-Droid, and Blokada in particular has worked wonders. It blocks ad hosts at the DNS level, which is more battery-efficient than a traditional adblocker, but that also makes it necessary to clear out your DNS cache. I've only had one notable issue that required me to disable Blokada - adding a bank account to Venmo wouldn't work for some reason.

Domain blocking is still crucial, absolutely necessary -- but in our experience no longer sufficient. The adversary has wormed its way into 3rd party domains that sometimes must be allowed in certain 1st parties; it has even wormed its way into 1st parties via actual inside-1p-firewall code, or CNAME hacks to hide in subdomains.

Nothing against Blokada, but as a realist using ad blockers (not just Brave), I need more than domain blocking these days.

I like how you mentioned fdroid. I am a loyal user. I use Firefox klar. + Duckduckgo.com for all net activities. 100% private and 0 adds and 0 tracking.

Wow, you're a saviour! Blokada is exactly what I've been looking for ever since I switched to a non-rooted android phone.

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