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Comment by kogepathic | Hacker News Reader

> Over the past year and a half I have become accustomed to the idea that I get to run free applications on my phone in exchange for being shown semi-frequent ads. This tended not to bother me most of the time, except when Android apps would suddenly show me full screen videos at high volume.

Really? I installed AdAway [1] on my Android phone and since then I have seen no ads. Zero.

The only issue is that some legitimate apps don't work, because they pull content from sits which are blacklisted (mostly stock ticker apps). I feel that's a small price to pay for not having battery and data sucking ads during my phone experience.

Yes, it requires root to install the hosts file. That's basically a one time event (I rarely update the list and still never see ads) and the battery impact is none because the ad blocking works at DNS level (as opposed to say, a system-wide proxy)

[1] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=Adaway&fdid=...

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Huh. I've just never installed any ad-based applications. If there's a no-ad paid version for a buck or two I'll buy it, otherwise, I just don't use it.

How did you know which apps have ads? Until recently it was not shown anywhere I think?

Play Store comments, magazines and web sites that review applications?

I never install anything that hasn't been reviewed.

If it's a gateway to a paid service (music stores, Uber, Lyft, etc), it generally won't have ads.

If it's free, but not a gateway to a paid service, I check to see if source is available; if source is available, it generally doesn't have ads (and if it does, I can just build it myself and remove them).

If the above checks fail, I check for a paid, ad-free version. If such a version exists, that implies the free version has ads. If the price is reasonable, I'll buy it, otherwise I'll skip it.

Finally you have free-as-in-beer but not as in freedom apps, that don't have paid alternative or any other way of generating revenue. I just assume those apps are either encrusted in ads or scams, so I don't install them.

The latest version of the play store identifies apps that show ads or have in-app purchases.

https://files.derf.us/Screenshot_20160801-105001.png

If you only download Free Software, like from F-Droid, you can be certain it won't have advertisements or other creepy features.

The Play Store is a wild west of crap though, so you have to be much more careful.

That sounds great in theory, until you pay for the no-ad version and the developer crams ads in a month or two later.

I think at this point you're better off going network-wide blocking to cover all your devices instead of just the few empowered to provide this security themselves.

I use a self-hosted DNS server called https://pi-hole.net/ for that, it was created for Raspberry Pis but I put it into a Vagrantfile and combined it with block lists similar to Ghostery from https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts to form https://github.com/benlowry/pihole-extended-hosts

A commercial solution similar to that was just all over HN too - https://optimal.com

Or you can install this via debug mode and adb push and then run install from the recovery image if you can flash one.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1916098

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