AdGuard was my ad blocker of choice on Android for years, but man did they fall off a cliff recently. I used them when you could purchase a forever license (which I don’t even think is an option anymore?), and it was great. All ads would be blocked basically everywhere, whenever they’d sneak through it just meant there was a filter that was out of date and needed to be updated.
Then about a year ago, the shenanigans started. Non-stop emails like OP is complaining about but also - their service BROKE whenever my phone would switch from data to wifi or vice versa. Like, any time it switched network types, just no internet would work at all. I’d have to force quit AdGuard and suddenly everything was fine. The timing happened when android updated from 12 to 13, so I figured it was something to do with that and emailed customer service. I got a notice that said something like “due to high ticket volume, it may be SEVERAL WEEKS before we get to your ticket or acknowledge it is being worked on, thank you for your patience.” So they’re spamming your inbox non-stop trying to click farm, but they have nobody actually working on the product. I never heard anything ever again (still haven’t…account is still active, email is still the same). I tried reaching out 3 or 4 more times but I’ve never received a response.
I do hate to say it but I haven’t found any software level ad blocker that was as good as AdGuard. I’ve been using AdAway and it does an okay job but only like 80% as effective if say. Most others I tried were shit.
You use it on the phone? I used to use Adaway exclusively but that was before a couple years ago when I stopped rooting my phones. Now I’m just using Block this! on the phone, does the job well. I’m happy with it at least… Something got on my nerves about Adguard on the phone but it’s too long ago for me to remember now. :-)
Yes I used AdAway and AdGuard exclusively on my phone. I use ublock for everything on my desktop, and will until it stops being effective. I never see ads on desktop of any sort so it’s still chugging like a champ but to my knowledge they don’t make an OS level blocker for Android.
AdAway is available on f-droid, it’s not in the app store as far as I know.
Well they did reply to my ticket to apologize and explain, and also posted on their subreddit as to their error in making some changes to their email system that caused duplicate emails to fire out. So I give them credit for that at least
You can still buy a lifetime license. I got the family one (9 devices) for $170 a few months back, haven’t received any spam, and am really enjoying the extra features like userscript injection.
This is all on mobile. On desktop, I use ABP and uBlock Origin for ad blocking, and Tampermonkey for userscripts. But since none of those work on mobile unless you use specific browsers and avoid client apps altogether, AdGuard has been a pretty good replacement for me.
Reminds me at the time somebody managed to lag GitHub's emails for several hours by pinging the entire Epic Games group (which consists of basically anyone who linked their GitHub account to their Epic Games account to see Epic's source codes)
Hmm. I’m on the Adguard mailing list, and they send email very infrequently. And it’s always good stuff, too. Updates about privacy breaches, government policy that affects privacy, etc.
Yeah same here, I’ve been on that list for maybe years this never happened, I’m by no means disparaging them or saying they do it all the time … Yesterday must have been some glitch lol, I just thought it was funny… First button when you open the email is to purchase😂
Yeah… It was amazingly persistent… That screenshot doesn’t even show all the emails… They continued for a while after that… But eventually they did stop… I raised a support ticket with them about it just to see what they say, no response yet… But anyway it was comical when it was happening, I thought maybe the DDOS guys were after me since I use lemmy.world ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Ooooh boy, this happened yesterday… I’m not using Adguard, I was only still on their mailing list from some time idk when when I tried it, I use uBlock Origin. The post isn’t really about or because I use Adguard, it’s the irony
Nice, I was just going to suggest uBlock Origin. Side hack, I use simplelogin.io (or use annonaddy) so that every site get’s a different email address. Easy to turn off emails, and makes you more hack resistant.
AdGuard have a free product called “AdGuard Home” that’s like PiHole but more powerful. It lets you run a DNS server on your own network that blocks ads, and uses encrypted DNS queries (DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS) to prevent your ISP from snooping on the requests. Some ISPs build ad targeting profiles based on the sites you visit, and just using a third-party DNS server (like Google’s 8.8.8.8 or Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1) doesn’t solve this since it’s still clear-text and the ISP can still collect the data.
This lets you block ads on devices that can’t run adblockers, like TVs. It runs well on even the cheapest Raspberry Pi 4B, too.
Well the first post actually totally disappeared without a trace… That’s why I posted it again. I was on Reddit and almost never posted, but here I get more involved for some reason, feels generally a better vibe… Generally🙄
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