DNS level filtering is the only choice for system level filtering but is less flexible and harder to manually override false positives than application level filtering like ublock.

If your browser supports adblock (eg on Android use Firefox or Kiwi) then disable DNS filtering for the browser (ie override the system level filtering) by using browser privacy settings to choose an unfiltered DoH provider like Cloudflare.

> If your browser supports adblock then disable DNS filtering for the browser

Why would I want to disable DNS filtering? What advantage does that give?

UBo is great but does use a small amount of CPU whereas DNS filtering won't use any on my phone - its all on the DNS server. I'd rather filter out as much as possible with DNS filtering and then clean it up with UBo cosmetic filtering and more precise blocking.

Is there a way that a vpn could use the dns filtering list to reject any requests to or from ip addresses that resolve to names in the list? Would that simply break everything?

My only problem with NextDNS is the youtube ads, but that's kinda unavoidable. Otherwise works flawlessly.

YouTube ads are wholly avoidable. I still use the deprecated YouTube Vanced but there are many alternatives like it coming including ReVanced.

https://github.com/revanced

Not only that but with SponsorBlock (integrated in Vanced) you can even automatically skip promotional parts of the videos, intros, outros. The experience is excellent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SponsorBlock

1Blocker on iOS has a safari extension that specifically targets YouTube ads [0]. The only caveat is that you need to use Safari and not YouTube’s native app.

[0] https://backstage.1blocker.com/how-to-block-youtube-ads-in-s...

Brave filters out those for me pretty well - in fact that's most of what I use it for, FF + UBlock is my default browser on Android, but doesn't do quite as well with Youtube (and then I am using Nextdns via Private DNS for system-wide blocking).

Does dns filtering work well with android ?

I've noticed most of the recent android based handled scanner we got at office refuse to even use our dhcp provided dns including to resolve local address (forcing us to use IP instead of dns for our internal warehouse apps) and complain about "no internet" because 8.8.8.8 is not open.

It works fine against all of the apps, but I don't expect it to work fine for Google things.

On Android, I've become a fan of Kiwi browser - It's a chromium fork that includes the ability to install chrome extensions on mobile. I've been able to keep the same extensions for ublock origin, bypass paywalls, and just read that I do on my desktop chrome environment.

It's open source as well.

Use a DNS based adblocking and you're free to use whichever browser you want. Kiwi has clean interface and I still use it nonetheless.