How do you guys manage proper ad blocking on mobile? I haven’t gotten anything to work successfully (iOS).

If you use Safari, the blockers from the App Store work fine (I use 1Blocker). If you use a third party browser, they don't get access to Safari's blockers (for no good reason, it's all WebKit after all) so you'll need to use a browser that provides its own blocking in some way.

The good reason (for Apple) is that it is an anti-competitive measure

On Android I use the insecure and questionable approach of Kiwi browser, which will run desktop chrome plugins including Ublock. Interested to hear if anyone has a better solution.

On Android you can use Firefox with uBlock Origin... no? It's been a few years.

A lot of people left firefox on android, when they removed their prior version/codebase a few years back, and introduced an alpha quality product with no extensions, endless crashes, and bugs galore.

It took them a year or so to even add back in extension support. and so many things lacked for a long time.

I don't feel like using a product that is so horribly planned, amd executed. Sheer incompetence.

raises hand I'm in this group. I finally gave up on mobile Firefox a few years back despite being a user and advocate for many years prior to that. The leadership and product decisions at Mozilla are indescribably bad and have done a huge amount of damage to formerly great product. Desktop Firefox still works ok, although it also suffers from too many bad product decisions.

For mobile I use Vivaldi which is not bad. The adblocker isn't as good as uBlock Origin but is mostly good enough, and the builtin dark mode works really well.

Firefox with uBlock Origin is arguably the best browsing experience available on Android.

1Blocker looks like the equivalent of unlock origin lite I use in Firefox except the darned thing is yet another subscription service. I wish I could get u lock origin on iOS and just make a one time donation/payment to the developer.

There are many other blockers, including fully free ones. I pay the trivial cost for 1Blocker because I want to support regular updates of blocking rules, and because it has one of the most extensive initial sets. They were also among the first to adopt the dynamic blocking for things like YouTube ads when the capability was added to Safari blockers in 2022.

I use Brave as a browser, works decently well and is available for Android too

Firefox Focus acts as a content blocker, and it cleaned up tfa quite nicely.

It also works in Safari, don’t have to use firefox focus.

Yup, this. Should have clarified.

Just flip on Reader Mode, it works great for me on most articles like this, though it is no replacement for a proper ad blocker

paid a few bucks for adguard pro and 1blocker waaaay back. currently using 1blocker with DNS override and it does work quite well.

Same question for android.

I use Kiwi Browser, it's based on Chrome but allows you to install extensions like uBlock

Firefox + uBlock origin

At a network level, I have nextdns, and then AdGuard pro for the browser. This combination works for me

Nextdns or pihole

And do you connect to your home network via VPN or something? Curious how this helps when on your phone's cellular connection

You can setup the phone to use encrypted dns like nextdns.

uBO works fine on Firefox for Android.

Blokada (non playstore version)

Pihole works pretty well for me.

NextDNS (blocks ads in all apps) and 1Blocker for YouTube ads in Safari. Both free.

Sometimes I have to remember to disable the Private DNS to make some sites work. Some of them just don't work with nextDNS on. Other than that, NextDNS works great.

This is my setup exactly. Works great

> How do you guys manage proper ad blocking on mobile?

On Android, I installed Firefox and uBlock Origin. It was pretty cool that the same thing I use on desktop Firefox (and other browsers) also works on mobile.

Except that it seems like Chrome on Android doesn't seem to support extensions, so I basically can't fix that browser, which mostly prevents me from using it for anything.

That said, I might soon get an iPhone (for developing/testing an app, which will probably also mean a MacBook, since they don't officially offer their software on other platforms), so I hope that things will work out there as well.

Phone runs a wireguard vpn client, uses pihole to perform dns lookups [1]. I haven't noticed anything being slower with the vpn on vs off and using whatever the mobile phone company provides for dns. Pihole deals with that page well.

Wireguard is pretty great.

[1] I configure pihole to use a local unbound installation on the same machine but you don't have to bother with that at all https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/

I also use Wireguard (and also Tailscale), but the battery impact is significant such that I only use it when specifically need to. How do you find the impact?

I'm pretty new at iphone, like 3 weeks.

settings->battery claims that it uses about 10% of my battery in 10 hours, or about as much as less than 20 minutes of firefox use.

I previously had an ulefone armor 9 which had vastly better battery life with a 3+ year old battery after switching off battery saver hacks and making no effort eg running wireguard 24/7, than the iphone 15 pro, which kinda sucks pretty hard. Struggles to get through a day. No idea how much of that is my fault. Settings claims basically none of it is, but can it be believed?

iPhone is super expensive for a device that does so many fundamental things so incredibly badly with fixes that must have been obvious for a decade. One example of many is the sheer idiocy of silent mode. My nokia 20 years(?) ago let you set it to silent for 2 hours so you weren't stuffed if you forgot to do it manually when the thing was over. Not iphone. iPhone pings when you go to bed and put it on charge when it claims to be in "sleep mode" which is just idiotic. Sucks if your partner was asleep and that's why you wanted it silent at that time. No way they haven't got feedback on that after what, 15 years of iphone? I took them a decade to replace the old silent mode switch that changes position to silent accidentally all the time for elderly relatives so I guess that's some kind of improvement but wow.

Oh before people take it personally, android sucks. And those are our only choices other than no longer participating in society.

AdAway can install itself as a VPN provider on your Android phone for the sole purpose of modifying traffic and blocking content. It is not actually a VPN. https://adaway.org/

For iOS I use Brave. Not as good as desktop uBlock Origin, but good enough.

Haven't found anything more effective on iOS yet.

I use Brave, which has built in ad blocking.

Also Brave lets you disable JS globally and then enable it on a per-site basis.

The UX is nice; the switch to toggle JS for the current site is right under a drop-down menu in the URL bar, and it remembers your settings for each site independently.

Brave works well enough for me.

The Orion browser might be an answer https://browser.kagi.com/ I haven't personally tried this browser as I'm on Android but heard of it as I'm a Kagi subscriber.

Ka-Block! works for me on iOS. Its an extension for mobile Safari.

I finally broke down and pay the $5 a year for AdGuard on iOS. Even blocks YouTube ads and haven’t gotten the “three strikes and you’re out” notice on that yet so I’ll keep using it as long as it works. I basically never see ads.

Brave or Chrome browser with your own Nextdns.io DNS setting. Brave specifically also offers to remove YT ads its mobile iOS browser. Worked for my wife, but she'll be switching to Android soon anyways.

I have been using purify, but it's like 5 years old and seems to be easily detectable by anti-adblockers.

I got several as they went on sale, and am trying AdBlock Pro right now, on the theory that newer and more up to date ones will more effectively anti-anti-adblock.

I found AdGuard Pro in my extensions. Must have been on sale, as it's the pricey "no subscription" version of the product. Will try if the above doesn't work out (I expect that it will)

I use Brave Browser on iOS. But I also have Safari with Adblock enabled - it’s another app you need to download.