This is a text-only version of the following page on https://raymii.org: --- Title : My phone serves me 400+ ads and trackers per hour. Blokada, the best android adblocker, beats 'm all! Author : Remy van Elst Date : 16-02-2019 URL : https://raymii.org/s/blog/My_phone_serves_me_400_ads_per_hour_blokada_blocks_beats_them_all.html Format : Markdown/HTML --- [![][1]][2] Recently I switched to a new phone. After a few years (!) my old phone stopped receiving calls making it time for a new one. The new phone has Android, which allowed me to install a system wide adblocker, Blokada. Why do you need an adblocker? Besides not seeing advertisements and being tracked/spied on in your every move, it improves battery life, makes your device more secure (no more malicious advertisements), makes pages and apps load faster, makes your data plan (4g) last longer and most pages are cleaner to view and read. It's not just me telling you that, the big [antivirus and security software vendor AVG says the same][3]. Blokada works by posing itself as a local VPN, filtering advertisements, trackers and all kinds of nasty things that spy on you or bring in malware. It does not require root access on Android, it's open source and best of all, it works very well. To my big surprise after three days of using my phone (after everything was set up and transferred), Blokada blocked almost 5000 (five-thousand!) advertisements and tracking requests. That's more than 70 requests an hour, so an ad every minute (if you would use the device for that 72 hour period). According to the [Google Wellbeing][4] statistics, in those three days, I used my phone actively for 12 hours. That means my phone served me more than 400 ads or trackers per active hour. ![][5] But those ads/trackers are not just served only when the phone is in use. Just before I went to bed, I reset the counters, when I woke up it had blocked 400 requests already. That means, even when I'm sleeping and not using my phone, it is being used to spy on me (tracking) and to serve advertisements. Blokada is free and open source software and can be found [on blokada.org][6]. I recommend you install it. With the default adblock list (energized blu) plus the tracker list, I have not found any sites or applications that did not work, the user experience is just as it would be without blokada. Battery life is still the same, maybe even a bit better. On the desktop (browser) I recommend [uBlock Origin][7].

Recently I removed all Google Ads from this site due to their invasive tracking, as well as Google Analytics. Please, if you found this content useful, consider a small donation using any of the options below:

I'm developing an open source monitoring app called Leaf Node Monitoring, for windows, linux & android. Go check it out!

Consider sponsoring me on Github. It means the world to me if you show your appreciation and you'll help pay the server costs.

You can also sponsor me by getting a Digital Ocean VPS. With this referral link you'll get $100 credit for 60 days.

[1]: https://raymii.org/s/inc/img/blokada1-small.png [2]: https://raymii.org/s/inc/img/blokada1-big.png [3]: http://web.archive.org/web/20190216070854/https://www.avg.com/en/signal/5-reasons-you-should-use-an-adblocker [4]: http://web.archive.org/web/20190216064336/https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104987/google-digital-wellbeing-pixel-android-9-pie-exit-beta-features-now-available [5]: https://raymii.org/s/inc/img/welzijn1.png [6]: https://blokada.org/ [7]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock [8]: https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=7435ae6b8212 --- License: All the text on this website is free as in freedom unless stated otherwise. This means you can use it in any way you want, you can copy it, change it the way you like and republish it, as long as you release the (modified) content under the same license to give others the same freedoms you've got and place my name and a link to this site with the article as source. This site uses Google Analytics for statistics and Google Adwords for advertisements. You are tracked and Google knows everything about you. Use an adblocker like ublock-origin if you don't want it. All the code on this website is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 license unless already licensed under a license which does not allows this form of licensing or if another license is stated on that page / in that software: This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see . Just to be clear, the information on this website is for meant for educational purposes and you use it at your own risk. I do not take responsibility if you screw something up. Use common sense, do not 'rm -rf /' as root for example. If you have any questions then do not hesitate to contact me. See https://raymii.org/s/static/About.html for details.