Advertisement providers that work in mobile really need to get their shit together. Ads that redirect the app store are utterly unacceptable and ludicrously common. Audio ads seem less common, but are just as unacceptable. I browsed without an ad blocker on mobile for a year or two before I got so fed up with the malware bullshit that I switched to Firefox for Android with ABP installed. Advertisers have no one but themselves to blame for the prevalence of ad blocking software.
- when you first go to the website, you get the ad-infested website
- you can pay for the app, and now, no more ads. In Android apps, the amount tends to be crazy low, like less than a cup of coffee. Pay that and get no ads is a no-brainer really...
Relatedly, I could really do with an in-app ad blocker for Android, because some ads I'm getting bounce me out of the app without user intervention and into a spammy web page.
This is what really annoys me about not being able to block ads on Android. I am really hoping content blockers on iOS will convince Google to do it as well. 30 seconds of ads for an 8 second page is unacceptable. Not only that but the potential for malware with no protection is huge. Who knows what those ads are able to send back in tracking, or inject into the phone.
Stupid headline on Google's part - they make this sound far worse than it is. I've never, ever seen a single ad on any of my Android phones (minus in-browser) except for in a couple random games I have downloaded.
Ah yes, fullscreen horribad adverts that takeover your mobile screen. The entire page goes dark and some overlay ad has appeared on the news site you want to look at either trying to get you to log in, buy something or download their app (full of ads) but you can't scroll around to find where the actual ad is to close the popup as the overlay is so far out of resolution it doesn't fit your device, so you just give up on the blacked out content.
The only solution I could come up with for Android/iOS was to run a remote digital ocean firewall to block all ads at the network level, and connect to it with a VPN. Everything else I've tried or implemented on the devices themselves ate up too much resouces or had to be dangerously elevated in privilege (NDK) just to stop the damn ads. A bonus of this method is you can also experiment with filtering known Android bugs before they reach your device if for whatever reason you can't update your system.img
System wide ad blocking is available on Android. You just need to buy the correct phone (hint: Samsung galaxy).
On a serious note, Samsung is so far ahead of every other manufacturer (including Google) I wonder why people buy anything else. For me, whenever I need to buy a new phone, there are two options to consider: Samsung or iPhone.
This is why I pretty much stopped using mobile internet on my phone outside of looking up stuff on maps or maybe wikipedia. The mobile web is unusable now on iOS. I have a ~5 inch long screen, most websites give me an inch of readable space between the banner ad and the massive autoplaying video ad consuming the bottom of the screen, and the footer ad. All of them have the tiniest close button imaginable, even using my index finger can lead to fat fingering it and clicking some ad that instantly takes me to some entirely unrelated app on the app store instantly, or fakes a popup notification that my device is compromised. Even if I do manage to successfully hit close, another ad pops up in that space a few seconds later. Its like the internet before ad blockers in the early 2000s, full of malware in the ads.
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