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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> Ultimately, despite our best efforts, Apple’s updates may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14.

Seems like Apple is really backing up their rhetoric with real action. Awesome news for anyone that values privacy. Kudos to Apple.

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This is what gets me to move away from Android. I like the Andoird ecosystem more, but my hate for advertising supercedes all of that.

That's ironic given some of the best possible ad blocking on mobile devices is Ublock Origin on Firefox mobile which is only available on Android (Apple only allows third party browsers to wrap Safari on iOS). Its 2020 and the only modicum of privacy you can get is a rooted android device.

Yeah but that only blocks browser based ads - what Apple is doing here is blocking trackers at the OS level - this is what FB is complaining about since their SDK allows the device to be tracked - not just browsers.

Does Android SDK let the device to be tracked?

TrackerControl is also a great app (available on F-Droid[1]; probably also on the Play Store but I wouldn't know) that works without root. It blocks a blacklist of known tracker domains and you can turn them on/off per-app.

For example, does your HackerNews app need to talk to Google? Probably not, so that gets blocked by default. Does your Newpipe/YouTube app? Yes, so you should unblock that from talking to Google. The Spotify app also tries to talk to like 9 different tracking domains, but only one category is actually required to fully use the app. Screenshot: https://dro.pm/n.png (Current version doesn't yet allow toggling per-domain in an attempt to make it easier/more manageable; but iirc allowing that is a planned change.)

The app is under active development and the dev seems to listen to feature requests, so if you have any... :). One downside is that it doesn't work alongside other VPN apps because it pretends to be a VPN. If anyone has a good idea how to solve that, the dev asked for ideas if I remember correctly.

I already blacklisted advertising domains in /etc/hosts and disabled things like broadcast listeners so certain apps don't receive the OnBoot/OnAppInstalled/etc. events to limit what they notice and can do, but with TC I feel like my privacy on Android got a substantial boost. Spotify was the last app I use with Facebook integration and I was wondering what to do about it, but I think that is not an issue anymore now.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.f...

Blokada is a similar local-vpn adblocker available on F-droid. It uses the same block lists as browser adblockers, so much less configuration is required.

I don't currently use an iPhone (contemplating jumping ship as well), but my understanding is you can get similar functionality on there using AdGuard.

> Its 2020 and the only modicum of privacy you can get is a rooted android device.

There is also Pinephone with pure GNU/Linux and killswitches.

That is a good point. I switched from Chrome to Firefox for ublock, and I use Firefox Focus regularly. That will be sad to lose moving to iOS.

Just FYI Firefox Focus is also on iOS. (And it also acts as a third-party content blocker for Mobile Safari, though it’s no uBlock Origin.)

Firefox Focus is on iOS; I use it as an ad-blocker in Safari, and to view the occasional Instagram or FB page. It does a pretty good job of blocking ads, even though it's restricted to using WebKit.

iOS has many ad blockers which work as well as Ublock. 1Blocker for example. On top of it these blockers don’t need to read contents of the site to block ads.

uBlock Origin can filter HTML elements. That includes script tags. It can replace scripts when blocking them breaks pages. Safari content blockers can't work as well.

It's really not a big deal.

Only if they made this accessible to everyone. You need a thousand dollar phone which is useless in 3 years

https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/

Apple has 5 years support for their iPhones, which is way longer than the 18months from other manufacturers.

Good sarcasm!

Sometimes it’s hard to communicate tone through text alone, but I really think you managed it there. Looking forward to more of your witty comments.

Yes, it's a tragedy that the iPhone SE and 6S became unsupported after squints 6 years and counting.

I have a three year old iPhone X that works just fine. My Mom is still using my 5 year old iPhone that I gave her when I bought my new one ...

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