A few days ago my friend complained that her phone had randomly started popping up ads on its screen as she was just using it. She had to dig through the play store and find the 'recently used apps' to identify the culprit, which was a random app she'd downloaded that after a few days updated itself to start pumping out ads.

That is a distinctly android problem, and is an example of one I'm glad to avoid by sticking to iOS.

> random app she'd downloaded

Perhaps she should be more selective with apps she installs? Also, how would this be exclusive to Android? iOS apps can have ads on them. Even if the feature is added with an update.

The ads weren't only displaying in the app, they were appearing over other apps. This is something that simply can't happen in iOS.

How does a standard user know whether a small app to e.g. manipulate photos (as in this instance) is going to be updated a few days later to show ads when it's not running? Shouldn't an end user be able to trust Google's app marketplace to not feed them junk like this?

There's a permission "draw over other apps" which has legitimate uses but is also used for crap like this.

> Firefox+uBlock on Android is soooo nice for a fast mobile browsing experience

I use BlockBear on safari. Any speed gains you may have because of uBlock are offset by the cpu speed gains on iPhone XS. Hell, hacker news loads faster(less than a blink of my eye) on my iPhone than 2017 MacBook Pro.

> Any speed gains you may have because of uBlock are offset by the cpu speed gains on iPhone XS.

Depends on network performance, how heavy your typical sites visited are, and what type of configuration you're running on uBlock.

Anecdotally, I find my Snapdragon 835 phone with Firefox/Ublock Origin to feel somewhat faster than my A10 with Safari/1 Blocker X. (Plus Firefox/uBlock gives various QOL improvements over Safari, like customizably removing cruft from various sites, and not autoplaying video.) My biggest complaint with Firefox/uBlock Origin is that the UI isn't very nice for whitelisting scripts on mobile.

Firefox Focus (https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-ios) claims to block ad trackers.

What do you mean by the “capped” blacklist API?

There is a limit of 50,000 URL filters.

Which is perfectly fine for me but if you have a lot of subscribed lists it is possible to go over it.

At the moment my 1Blocker X installation is sitting at ~93,000 rules and I haven't seen a single ad or social widget in almost a year now.

Sure, part of them aren't domain/URL based (they are CSS/XPath based) so I might not actually be disproving what you said.

I believe 1blocker X made a new app with more categories so they could get around the cap. Like the cap was category based, but not hard to circumvent.

Oh, that might explain it. Thanks for the tidbit.