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I don’t think they’ve made that clear at all. To me it seems they’ve made it clear they don’t want misuse of VPNs. The fact they provide APIs to do ad blocking across all web content says that they are very much ok with it.

I note from reading AdGuard’s App Store description that it seems to do as blocking with the content blocking APIs, and uses the VPN only for DNS changes.

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Blocking ads system-wide with DNS filtering (intercept dns requests, block ad and tracking domains) is exactly what AG was doing before the policy shift; and it is still able to do it, but now the default blacklist is empty because of Apple.

Right. So now it is NOT a VPN ad blocker. It’s an ad blocker using the system frameworks, plus a VPN app that allows finely grained network customisation, one use case of which is ad blocking, but not one that the app itself encourages. That fits my hypothesis.

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