Block Ads on Android with Block This

Productivity Sauce

While there are several adblocking apps available for Android, they are not without their shortcomings. Some of them require root, while others will work with a browser only. Enter Block This, an open source adblocker that requires no root privileges and blocks ads globally. It does so by using the blocking by DNS technique. The app's website provides a detailed description of how this approach works. To oversimplify, all requests from the Android device are passed through the Block This DNS server which filters all blacklisted resources and returns a "clean" result. To make this technique work on the Android platform, the Block This app creates a so-called local VPN on the Android device.

The good news is that you don't need to understand the technical aspects of Block This. Simply grab the latest APK package from the project's website, install it on your Android device, and launch the app. Enable the Start on Boot option, press the Start button, and you are done. From now on, Block This will quietly sit in the background, doing its job of blocking pesky ads.