Adblock Plus is one of those set-it-and-forget-the-ads apps made popular on the desktop for years now. While some ads can be unobtrusive (ours, for example), other sites bombard users with pop-ups, takeovers or, worse, that woman with the peeling skin.
Adblock Plus has made its way to Android for the first time, and while it works for all Android users above version 3.1 over WiFi, it’s compatible with Android 2.1+ on all phones and tablets for users with root access. The app works in the background, blocking ads on Chrome and the native browser. Firefox users can install a separate plugin, but it works the same way.
Ads cannot be blocked on sites accessed through SSL, which is the way it should be since secure sites like that don’t usually have anything that should be hidden. Non-root users running versions of Android below 3.0 must manually set up a proxy to block ads, and certain older devices have special instructions that largely negate the use case of an ad blocker in the first place.
Nevertheless, if you’re looking for an all-encompassing ad blocking agent for Android, and you have root, this is the way to go. Adblock Plus updates its filter list in the background, but there is no whitelist feature available at the moment, though it seems to be in the works.
The app description notes something important, too: “Please note that Adblock Plus will probably become the highest data-using application on your Android device. However, this is only because Adblock Plus needs to filter the data to ensure that the ads can be blocked. Adblock Plus is actually only using a fraction of the data shown on your device.”
You can download Adblock Plus for Android from Google Play.
Via: Android Police
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