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.