I did this for the longest time until I realised that because AdGuard works best as a virtual VPN, it is unable to run alongside an actual VPN. Luckily my VPN (and many others) support ad blocking too.
That’s not what I’m talking about. I meant to say that AdGuard on mobile (Android) runs by pretending to be a VPN in order to intercept all connections and filter the ads out of them. This works great to remove ads in apps, etc.
However, because it hooks into the VPN interface you can’t then run another VPN (for example Proton VPN) because Android only allows one VPN to run at any time.
Oh you’re talking about AdGuard VPN not solely the main AdGuard product. Definitely not ideal. It doesn’t offer the same level of features as my current VPN who offers ad blocking anyway. Not to mention a few suspicious quotes from their website:
AdGuard VPN protocol uses the most secure and fast encryption algorithm to date – AES-256
From the very outset, we resolved to develop and deploy an in-house VPN protocol instead of picking a canned solution — that’d be too easy
We are going to make our protocol implementation publicly available in the future. Sadly, right now we don’t have enough time to prepare the project
we collect data about how you interact with our services, how much traffic you’ve used, and for how long have you been using our services
ADGUARD SOFTWARE LIMITED is a company registered in Nicosia, Cyprus, registered office is at Klimentos 41-43, KLIMENTOS TOWER, Flat/Office 25, 1061, Nicosia, Cyprus and acts as the data controller when processing your data
Considering Cyprus telecommunications laws it doesn’t seem like the safest place to headquarter a telecommunications privacy company.
Adguard has been a trusted company in the adblocking space for a very long time, and their CEO and company is quite openly active in the privacy and cybersecurityrealm, so that’s important.
That said, their VPN is a really new product, so there’s a lot of room for improvement.
They do have the best adblocking solution, in my opinion, so if VPN is also needed, they give you something for that. The alternatives are often messy or not totally compatible.
For me, it works great for bypassing geo restrictions, but my threat model isn’t on the extreme end. I got a plan really cheap, so it saves me money over PIA and Windscribe, which i used previously (and sucked for streaming).
I do suggest that everyone find a solution that works for them, regardless of who they go with.
If I had to pick only one of the two, I’d prefer local blocking because it cannot only not load ads, but also remove the placeholder/frame the ad would’ve been in. It’s also better at circumventing anti-adblock scripts.
That being said, DNS-based blocking is great outside of browser use, and it blocks many ads and tracking attempts in mobile and desktop apps.
A combination of both is best, really. I use uBlock Origin in the browser (or AdGuard Pro with Safari on Mac and iPhone) and then NextDNS. NextDNS is configured rather conservative though, because it can cause things to break otherwise, and that’s hard to manage when you’re not the only use of your network.
Another benefit of using uBlock Origin is the ability to use the cosmetic filters so you can remove elements from the page that aren’t served as ads in the typical sense. As an example when you’re reading an article and there’s an obnoxious box half way through that says CONSIDER SUBSCRIBING etc. It’s not loading any external resources, it’s just inlined HTML. But you can enter element picker mode and if you are able to uniquely target that element you can filter it out.
DNS-based blocking more complete for your whole network, independent of the device settings for tech-avers users/kids. DNS-based blocking is less flexible for all users in the network - especially when you need to make exceptions for certain sites. They are also limited to your home network, unless you have a VPN server. Therefore, for mobile devices app-based blocking is the main way to go. Consequently, both make sense and your use case is relevant.
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