Blocking ads on Android devices

Introduction

So one forum member posted a question:

According to you, what is the best way to delete the ads on a Android smartphone? I would like to remove ads on Chrome, Youtube, my games, etc.

And being a helpful person that I am, I’m going to share what I know about blocking ads on android.

Disclaimer

Some methods mentioned in this thread are dangerous because we will be editing system files, I am not responsible for anything that can and will happen to your device.
If your device breaks, you get to keep all the pieces.

Methods

Using an ad-blocking browser

This one is pretty straight forward, there are mobile web browsers that have ad-blocking capabilities The one I use daily is CM Browser, although the most popular one is probably the Brave browser.

Cons: Only blocks ads inside the browser, not system-wide
Pros: Easy to setup, root is not required

Disabling connection to the Internet

Also pretty straight forward, if you disable the Internet connection ads just won’t show, so just disconnect from your wifi and disable mobile data.

Cons: You can’t access the Internet obviously, can’t play games that requires you to connect to the Internet.
Pros: Very easy, no setup required, just works.

Patching apps

There are tools that you can use to patch-out ads from applications, one of these tools is LuckyPatcher. After launching LuckyPatcher you’ll be presented with a list of installed applications, now just chose the applications that you want to patch-out ads on, than go to: “Menu of patches”->“Remove Google ads” and select “Patch to remove Google ads”.

Cons: Does not work on all ads, you have to have a rooted phone, you have to re-patch after every update
Pros: It works pretty well in some cases

Blocking known ad-service’s by DNS

This is the one I use, basically you modify your device’s hosts file to stop ad-service domain names from getting resolved. The easiest method to accomplish this is to download an app called AdAway, you can find it on the F-Droid app store.

Cons: You have to have a rooted phone and have write access to the system partition, only works for the ad-services that are included in the public list (Otherwise you’ll have to add it manually)
Pros: Works pretty well, easy one-time setup

Final notes

Personally I use AdAway and CM Browser on my device, I do believe that AdAway is enough but using a browser centered on privacy also helps.
If I missed something ore you know more ways please share them in the comments.

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