Android offers Private DNS, just point that at nextdns.io and block things even within apps that aren't browsers.
The biggest benefit is definitely the sheer speed at which news websites load on my phone now, even when I'm on a crap connection.
Another benefit: This isn't a VPN, so you can still use a VPN whilst using Private DNS.
Edit: Also... lol, I can't access TFA as plausible.io is also blocked on my network and phone. I'm going to assume that the article is actually an analytics competitor whose pitch is "GA is blocked, use us instead!".
Edit 3: NextDNS stats from my home network: 11.45% of DNS requests blocked, but from my phone 23.7% of DNS requests blocked. You need this more on your mobile than in a web browser!
You don't have to do that... NextDNS ultimately uses Cloudflare DNS under the hood, so just point yourself at 1.1.1.1 and you're done but it will block nothing.
If you want a DNS server to block things, know that the definition of what to block is subjective and some people may disagree with what you want to block.
For that reason you get an account, which allows you to have a configure, and that needs to be resolve to you... so at some level an identifier of the configuration is needed. This is the id.
I wish you could install umatrix, and it had a decent mobile UI. Umatrix has just transformed the way I browse the web and if anything it has educated me at the same time. I like seeing that this random site has about 2^5 different domain names contacted, ranging from ad-junk to CDNs. It tells me quite a lot about its developer. Sites with one hostname, minimally awful JS and few-to-none XHR requests get a thumbs up.
On the other hand, it probably means that I am a "false negative" in TFA's report. I'd love to know the correlation between the server logs and what Plausible shows for a connection. I'd also like to know how they infer OS -- e.g. for privacy reasons, my reported user agent is not accurate...
> I like seeing that this random site has about 2^5 different domain names contacted
You can see that in uBlock Origin already. The summary info has the number of domains connected and if you click on "more" you have the details, just like on desktop. You can also block JavaScript altogether for a particular site.
NextDNS does comprehensive blackholing of tracking and ads, very limited battery impact.
Works on ios and android.
I think their free tier is very generous at 300k lookups/month; otherwise it's something cheap like 2€/month if you want unlimited lookups (i use this to block tracking on all my devices + home network)
I've had bad experiences, battery-wise, using on-device adblocking solutions (that inspect DOM). An alternative i tried was tunneling to my raspberry pi that ran pihole (dns blocker), and bouncing all my traffic off the home connection, but that was also battery intensive.
You're right, this dns solution is very unobtrusive when it comes to energy use.
There may be an argument that Chrome is marginally faster than Firefox on desktop, and while this may also technically be true on mobile, it's completely dwarfed by the fact that Chrome is being asked render 5x as much crap (with animations and sound and video and nagbars and ...) compared to Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin.
You will literally regain hours of battery life. Those Joules belong to you -- don't just shrug and hand them to Google.
If on iPhone, install NextDNS and enable a blocklist which blocks GA, flip the switch, now NextDNS handles your DNS and will answer requests to GA with a "sorry cannot find this".
On Android I use personaldnsfilter (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dnsfilter.android/), which creates a local VPN, there are also actual VPN apps that allow blocking ad hosts, and you can also use AdGuard DNS directly.
Out of curiosity, what does this bring you over hosts file blocking, and how much does it affect battery life? I use dead-simple modifications to /etc/hosts and it seems to be remarkably good. Do you MITM yourself for further adblocking, or just use it for the modified DNS?
My phone is not rooted, and I just switched to nextdns.io on suggestion of another commenter here. I can't say about the phone battery, but I don't think it makes a big difference.
For Android, I'm using fennec with ublock origin and it's great. Also YouTube Vanced is very useful. And Infinity for a tolerable reddit experience on mobile.
Use Bromite, Vivaldi or Brave on Android. They have built-in ad tracker protection. The first two even support custom filtering lists.
On iOS the options are a bit worse but Brave has some kind of adblocking that works. Safari also supports blocking lists via AdGuard but it's more limited.
AdGuard (local app) works in Safari. I don't like safari, but the AdGuard blocking does not work in FireFox! I use DDG browser mostly and it works well. I do see the occasional ad.
The whole browser situation in iOS is really user unfriendly.
Firefox is another nice alternative if you have a good Android phone I guess.
Sadly, I have a quite old Android device (but its battery life it's still good) where Chromium-based browsers are already quite slow and Firefox feels even slower and drains the battery faster (the old Fennec was worse than the new one, it hanged for 30 seconds).
