
Blokada
A free and open-source ad blocker that works across apps and browsers.
Pros & Cons:
Our Review:
Blokada is a DNS-based ad blocker for protecting your Android mobile from ads and tracking. It works on non-rooted Android mobile devices, blocks ads across all your apps and browsers. Moreover, it is open source, easy to use by simply tapping the shield icon to enable or disable the blocker.
A DNS-based ad blocker behaves quite similarly to the way it blocks addresses in the Hosts file as described in this article How to Remove Google Text Ads. But Blokada works further as it redirects network traffic to a VPN interface it sets up to only allow queries for hosts that are not blacklisted in the filters.
The filters are updated automatically and contain hosts known for serving ads, tracking, spam, malware and other unwanted content.
In the blacklist, you can choose which hosts file to be included in the ad blocker. The Unified hosts file is a recommended configuration that strives to keep a balance between blocking effectiveness, battery impact and false positives. Other optional filters are HpHosts ads hosts file, MVPS hosts file, Adaway hosts file, Dan Pollock’s hosts file and Peter Lowe’s hosts file.
In the whitelist, a default whitelist and some apps are enabled by default for them to work properly. You can add more to the list if you need to whitelist more.
This app is under active development and some features are being enhanced. At the time of this review, Blokada blocked most of the ads I previously encountered but the whitelist did not work perfectly. All ads were blocked on a website that I had added to the whitelist.
Beware that Blokada is not available from the Play Store but from the developer's site. To install an Android application package (.apk) from sources other than the Play Store, you will need to enable “Unknown sources” in the settings on your devices. Upon doing so, the system reminds you in general that your device and personal data are more vulnerable to attack by apps from unknown sources. See also How to Install a Third Party App.
Link:
Get This Ad Blocker That Works Across Apps and Browsers on Android
Blokada was reviewed by Gizmos Freeware on