Gain Mobile DNS Privacy, Lose the Ads

There’s more than one way to increase your browsing speed.

Last year, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 initiative brought focus to the relevance of DNS in the browsing experience by highlighting its comparatively fast resolution speeds relative to those of other providers. But what if there was another way of achieving faster overall browsing speeds while gaining privacy as well as streamlining the browsing experience overall? There is.

The case.

While the practice is controversial, most of us have done it at some point or another: block ads. The fact of the matter is that, apart from cluttering precious screen real estate in an increasingly mobile world, you actually pay for mobile ads. The folks behind the ads are obviously paying for them, but you are too in terms of bandwidth, and therefore the time they take to download.

While these costs are diminishing with the ascent of “unlimited” mobile data plans, faster processors, and faster download speeds, the vast majority of users can still enjoy a discernible increase in performance by blocking ads today.

One of the best ways to go about it is to block at the DNS level. This shifts the the actual processing work behind ad-blocking to a remote DNS server — it also means that this setup will be effective whether or not Google Chrome removes the ability for extensions to block ads, as has been speculated.

In sum, the DNS solution outlined below may not resolve as quickly as Cloudfare’s offering (though probably still faster than your ISP’s) but when it does resolve there’s less to download and therefore less to process on the mobile device which translates into quicker overall page rendering — remember that ads consist of increasingly heavy multimedia.

The details.

While the aforementioned logic applies to both desktop and mobile browsing, I’ll go over iOS and Android setups as there are plenty of articles covering desktop use cases. We’ll be using AdGuard’s open-source DoH servers.

iOS

The iOS setup is very simple.

On iOS 14 or later, you can simply download this profile. After you download the profile, go to iOS Settings > Profile Downloaded > Install. This method takes advantage of iOS 14’s new built-in encrypted DNS feature.

On iOS 13 or below, install the DNSCloak app from the App Store, launch it, select the server named “adguard-dns-doh”, and tap the play button.

Android

If you’re on Android 9 or higher, simply navigate to Settings > Network & Internet > Advanced > Private DNS > Private DNS provider hostname > enter dns.adguard.com

Note, the Android instructions above use DNS over TLS which differs from DNS over HTTPS in that it uses port 853, rather than the standard HTTPS port 443, which may be blocked on some network firewalls. If you want to sidestep that potential issue, use the Android 8 or lower instructions found below even if on Android 9 or higher.

If you’re on Android 8 or lower, you will need to install a Google-owned app called Intra from the Play Store. Launch the app, navigate to Settings > tap on Select DNS over HTTPS Server > enter https://dns.adguard.com/dns-query > tap ACCEPT > exit Settings and toggle on the service.

Conclusion

These setups achieve the best of both worlds: DNS privacy and the security that comes with that, plus a faster less cluttered browsing experience.

I’m sure you’ll notice most ads gone, but can you notice the quicker page loading times?

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You can formally assess your ad blocking efficacy by clicking here.