To start with: good ad blocking is the best one can do for their security / privacy online these days!
For a long time adblocking on iOS devices (iPad / iPhone) was limited. One could use DNS based blocking (Pi-Hole or NextDNS are good options), but many advertisement circumvent these blocks. There was AdBlockPlus which worked well, however:
- I feel uneasy about the company behind it given past behaviour
- Even today, when installing on iOS, ABP forces the user to activate their subscription for a 7 days free trial and then one has to dig through the settings to deactivate it – less one gets charged after the 7 days
- For reference, the setting is under Settings > Apple Account > Subscriptions
- Ad blocking extensions have full access to the content of the websites you’re visiting (by necessity – since they have to remove part of it). I’m not comfortable with giving this company access to everything I visit / type in to a browser.
There is the current gold standard in adblocking – UBlockOrigin – however it’s not available for Firefox under iOS due to some dubious practices of Apple (Apple makes it so that you can’t really install alternative browsers on iOS – all the “alternatives” are actually reskins of Safari – so Firefox for iOS can’t support the Firefox extensions, less it gets banned from the AppStore – hopefully the EU will look into this anti-competitive practice and make it end soon).
So, I was excited when I’ve learned that uBlock Origin Lite is available for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698
Some thoughts:
- first and foremost: it works well!
- second: it’s free – although I would like to provide some support for the author, they don’t seem to be interested in it currently. So here I am at least spreading the news about it.
- third: I trust this extension more since it has a long reputation of being trustworthy and it’s F/LOSS.
- Sidenote: Apple doesn’t provide a way to verify that the source code published is the same as was used to build the binary in the AppStore like f-droid does for example – but maybe one day.
- what I also liked: theoretically it also has a minimal mode which doesn’t require access to the current website (see my concerns above about this kind of software). Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to work on the websites I frequent, but maybe it could be used in some situations where higher situations are needed.
And the setup:
- Install it from the AppStore
- Open Settings. Navigate to Safari -> Extensions
- Turn it on (optionally for private windows also)
- To avoid constant prompting, set the websites to “allow all” (the last option on the page)
Enjoy a safer, more private and faster browsing!
Update: also, don’t forget to disable the Advertising ID on your devices. Here is an EFF tutorial about how to.