Several years ago, I used Blockada, which was frequently recommended. According to some discussion threads, it seems to have fallen from grace.
What ad blocker that doesn’t require root do you use? What’s your experience with it? Would you recommend it?
I personally never found DNS adblockers to be very successful.
If you’re using Chrome, that’s why. Chrome bypasses your DNS settings and uses Google’s DNS because they found using the system settings was affecting their ad revenue. Using Firefox fixes this, although in Firefox you can just use ublock origin anyway, which works even better.
Chrome doesn’t behave that way for me. It uses my DNS settings correctly and ads are blocked. I can’t remember it ever not behaving, though I usually use Firefox.
The developers of an app that uses ads can also just route the traffic through a server that also provides something crirical for the app to work. You’d have some CDN probably serving both. I mean, in the long run, if app developers work againat it, you can’t block apps from showing ads by blocking network traffic.
I doubt that the Android security model lets apps know what’s happening on overlays, though, as doing so would create issues for Android as an OS. So apps that cover up ads are hard for app developers to defeat.