ELI5: Why are ad-blocking extensions so easy to come across and install on PCs, but so difficult or convoluted to install on a phone?

• Pi-hole

  2,356 46,711 8.0 Shell

  A black hole for Internet advertisements

  

You can block them at home and on the go with [PiHole](https://pi-hole.net. For on-the-go you just connect to your home network via VPN and can enjoy a ad-free life.

• nextdns

  970 2,897 7.3 Go

  NextDNS CLI client (DoH Proxy)

  

For a DNS resolver I'm currently using https://nextdns.io/ and it seems to be working pretty well at blocking ads except for YouTube.

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• packages

  46 3,814 9.9 Makefile

  Community maintained packages for OpenWrt. Documentation for submitting pull requests is in CONTRIBUTING.md (by openwrt)

  

If you have the hardware, you can also block DNS requests at the network level with open source network firmware. I've used OpenWRT and https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/files for years with great success.

• Fenix

  750 6,681 7.7 Kotlin

  Discontinued ⚠️ Fenix (Firefox for Android) moved to a new repository. It is now developed and maintained as part of: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android

  

I thought I'd try out Firefox for Android a while back. First thing I did is go to settings to set my homepage, but found that there's no option for it. The absence of such a traditional, basic feature annoyed me so much that I uninstalled.

• NewPipe

  2,059 28,509 9.8 Java

  A libre lightweight streaming front-end for Android.

  

• uBlock-issues

  454 859 5.1

  This is the community-maintained issue tracker for uBlock Origin

  

They're trying to significantly weaken adblock extensions.

• blokada

  485 3,008 8.3 Shell

  The official repo for Blokada apps.

  

You could also use apps like Blokada to create an ad-blocking local VPN which applies across the whole device. You can choose different lists for ad-blocking, phishing, trackers, etc.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• Windows-Auto-Night-Mode

  44 6,759 9.0 C#

  Automatically switches between the dark and light theme of Windows 10 and Windows 11

  

Allow me to improve your day (or night): https://github.com/AutoDarkMode/Windows-Auto-Night-Mode

Suggest a related project