1. SSL pinning is not actually that widespread. However, it is used by quite popular apps - Facebook and Twitter. Unfortunately, there is no way to deal with it without patching the apps itself. Also, modern Android versions limit the trust for user certs, basically only browsers trust that type of certs. The solution would be to move the cert to the system store, but it requires root.

2. It’s not iOS that’s restrictive but Apple. We can’t even mention anywhere in the app that you can block something using DNS filtering. We’re playing this reject-phonecall-reject-appeal game for two years already and I simply have no confidence that if we bring all the functionality to iOS they allow this. Other than that it’s possible and rather easy to do, the core filtering engine is implemented in C++ and we use it on all other platforms.

3. This is from talks with filters maintainers. But yeah, this is a good topic for an article, we should write one. Thanks for the tip:)

edit: my desire for moving filtering to the server-side actually comes from the experience of communicating with different stores. Also, Chrome’s upcoming changes contribute to my paranoia. Slowly, step by step, users are losing control over their own devices and apps.