How to block ads on Android

It’s always annoying when ads take up your favorite app spaces, maybe in your favorite game apps. Most free apps have ads embedded in them but most times these ads affect the user’s experience. You will agree with me that it is definitely annoying when ads start popping up in the middle of a game or when you are surfing the web.

Then you begin to wish for ways you can block ads in your favorite Android app. So in this article I want to share with you how to block ads on Android whether your device is rooted or not.

Note: I do support advertisements after all that how I earn my living, but if you really have a good reason to want to block ads on Android then I respect your wish and will show you how. Google has recently removed all adblocking apps from the play store so you may have to download them from third-party sites and remember to enable “Install apps from unknown sources” before installation.

Block Ads on Android:

AdAway: AdAway is by far the most effective way to block ads on Android as this app can easily block ads from most known sources. AdAway is an open source ad blocker for Android using the hosts file. It needs Android >= 2.1 and ROOT access.

Simply download the AdAway adblocker app and install it on your rooted Android device, launch it and select the “Download files and apply ad blocking” button, it will download some known host files to prevent their ads from ever reaching your phone.

AdAway allows you to select your own sources of host files, add exceptions to your Whitelist if an app is not working when specific hosts are blocked, define extra hostnames in your own Blacklist and add your own (hostname, IP)-pairs in the Redirection List.

This app supports most Android versions provided it has ROOT access and can be granted Read/Write access on the system-Partition.

Sometimes blocking ads can render some apps unusable, so you may have to whitelist such apps by doing the following;

Go to Menu > Your List and select the white tab

Go to Menu > Add and add a new domain & add the domain of the ads you want to show.

Note it’s not the domain of the app you will need to add rather the domain of the ads (domain hosting the ads) for example Google ads can be whitelisted or blocked by adding ad.doubleclick.net to the whitelist or blacklist respectively.

For UNROOTED devices, your only option to block ads on Android will be to use browser-based ads blocker like Adblock Plus.

Note you can’t block ads in free apps that are ads supported, there is no way to disable them except there is some sort of ad buy out option, in most apps you may have to upgrade to paid versions if you want to enjoy an add free version.

I hope you find this tutorial useful to share your views. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feed.