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Comment by fvdessen | Hacker News Reader

I've been a happy Android user for a long time, but mobile ads are so bad that I'm seriously considering switching to iOS just for the adblocking.

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I use adblocking on Android for years. Have you tried this? https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adaway

>Requires root: Yes

Some of us can't be bothered.

You are missing out.

No, not really.

On my desktop, I use Firefox with uBlock Origin. On my Android phone, I also use Firefox with uBlock Origin. shrug

If you're on Android, there are so many possible different solutions to the problem. You're not crippled to what Apple deem fit for you to have.

Off the top of my head, I can think of four more, other the suggestions in that blogpost.

- Firefox + uBlock. (Superb. Best mobile browsing experience.)

- Xposed Framework and something like UnbelovedHosts. (Probably root required)

- Ad-Free Time with MobiDNS. (Like $3 a month, additional benefits included. VPN/DNS redirect hybrid.)

- An ad-blocking proxy or VPN.

You aren't stuck waiting for a solution from a competitor that's late to the party.

We've been blocking adverts on Android for longer than Apple have let users change their onscreen keyboards...

Seconding Firefox with uBlock. Mozilla has made a big push, and Firefox for Android is a really great experience these days.

Good idea. Vote with your feet!

(Just switched, never looking back)

I see it as changing my phone from having 3 "pimps" (mobile operator + Samsung + Google) to having just 1 (Apple fending off the others). And for the price of a cup of coffee you get quite decent apps instead of freemium ad-supported, slow as hell, ugly garbage apps.

If you don't feel like enabling superuser (root) on the devices you own for system-wide ad blocking, Firefox for Android lets you install AdBlock Plus/Edge/etc. like any other extension and works quite well in my experience. When they stopped allowing those addons in mobile Chrome I started using mobile Firefox as my main browser and have been perfectly satisfied.

But yeah, if you don't mind setting it up so you can grant superuser permissions to something like Adfree Android, you get system-wide ad blocking which also gets rid of ads in most apps. Still, I haven't bothered in a while because good apps don't include really obnoxious ads and the good ones that offer free versions with unobtrusive ads deserve to make some money. If they're truly good apps, then I sorta feel bad when I don't even notice I'm using the free version because ads are blocked. There are a handful of apps where I fired them up on a new device before setting up Adfree and was reminded that I really ought to just shell out the $2-3 for the full version.

Why not use Firefox and an Ad-Blocking plugin?

They could be referring to the app landscape too.

So root it and get a device-wide ad blocker?

The security implications and trust you would have to give to such a tool is frighting. The adverts seem like the lesser of two evils.

There's adblocking for that as well. Adaway works decently. Xposed can even do more.

Are you saying that iOS9 has hooks for ad blocking in Apps? I doubt that.

No but typically applications on iOS are more likely to off a non-ad supported version. So perhaps they just mean in general.

I'm a bit more torn on this one. I've used Adfree Android before in this way but for the most part, if an app is good, I'll buy the full version. If it's something I just use a few times for a single purpose (and it's still useful), I'd like the dev to at least see some payment for it. If it's utter shit and full of obtrusive and annoying ads, I'd rather just uninstall it and give it a bad rating.

If you have SU/root, or build your own system.img you can use a hosts file to kill 99.9% of all in-app ads or apparently Adblock Plus has this feature too. The only time my hosts file failed was some simple weather app that refused to work when it detected no access to it's ad server so I rewrote it myself.

If you don't have root you can build your own VPN that can kill all ad traffic, a service that offers this must exist somewhere. If this all sounds too complicated buy an iPhone until Android enables an easy way to kill annoying mobile ads.

Another option is to use something like AdFree Android which includes a hosts file/blacklist that is frequently updated if you don't feel like making your own.

I use Privoxy at home to block Ads, only works connected on wifi at home but it's easy to setup.

There is adblocking on Android.

Ad blocking is very expensive. The iOS approach is the best idea. Have you seen the cost in memory and CPU of browser ad blocker extensions? That's prohibitive in mobile.

Have you tried Firefox and uBlock (maybe uBlock0, I forget) on a reasonable Android phone? It is amazing, and vastly superior to any other mobile browsing I've tried. Including Safari on an iPad.

Adaway just modifies your /etc/hosts file to redirect ad domains to localhost. That definitely doesn't seem expensive...

Parsing a huge /etc/hosts for every single hostname lookup certainly is expensive.

I'm not sure what the practical limits are on host file size, but I just checked my phone with up to date AdAway lists and it's sitting at 56429 lines (with about 10 or so of those being comments)

It seems unlikely that it's actually implemented that way.

If you can get root on your phone you can easily block 90% of advertising. The AdAway already mentioned is great but I also would suggest DroidWall and then you can effectively whitelist or blacklist any Android applications from using the network at all. Some apps only use your network connection to serve ads and in that case you just block those apps.

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