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Enshittification is coming for absolutely everything
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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Technology
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Yeah, <1% would be the more technically accurate answer.
I'm still not sure why that works, honestly. If I was going to be evil I'd load the ad data via the same packets as the app payload. It wouldn't be hard and there's no way I'm the first to think of this.
The vast majority of mobile ads are served from google or apple, which likely is not where the rest if the app data is served from. It makes it particularly easy to block mobile ads from adMob or whatever the apple equivalent is called.
You don't even need pihole, there are VPN-based apps that screen and block ad domains.
You don't even need apps, you can set your private DNS on you phone or desktop browser to an ad-blocking provider (which I think is probably similar to what a pihole does, though I don't know the technical details)
If too many people were blocking the ad servers, apps could tunnel the ads through a single connection to the app... but that would only work for ads served by the same platform as the app (like Meta ads in Meta apps, Google ads in Google apps, etc.), with 3rd party ad networks not trusting random app developers' tracking and engagement data to send them a payout... so blocking the ad servers is likely to keep working for those, and for the larger platforms as long as they don't see much value in spending resources to counter it.
Ah, that's a good point! I hadn't thought of that.
There's some approaches you could try there, but at some point I could actually be helping somebody, so I'll shut up.
And, ime, a lot of corporations are serving content through third party (or at least non-native) servers, which means that any blocker which touches any of those servers breaks content completely. I've experienced major Travel, banking, and retail sites which simply don't work unless most blacklisted sites are allowed. That means either turning blocking off for that main site entirely, or spending an hour testing every one of their 30 off-site connections to see which ones break. I don't have that kind of bullshit time, and the rest of my family don't have the patience or skill to do that troubleshooting. PiHole turned out to be multiple hours a week of frustration so I gave up - I already have a full time job and full slate of hobbies. In-browser blockers are, at least, easier to toggle on and off.