I’ve been using DNS66 for a while now, and I recently just randomly decided to disable it. And I’ve noticed slightly better battery life, but I’m sure it’s just placebo. Do adblock vpns use battery? What is the best lightweight adblock vpn that doesn’t use much battery and doesn’t affect speeds?
If your phone supports it enable private dns and put dns.adguard.com
The simple answer is that yes they do, but they, (good ones), save more than they use, because they can dramatically the number of successful network connections your device and the apps on it are making.
This reduces the data being transferred, which means your connection is being used less often and for shorted periods of time which means your battery lasts longer.
I’d advise using a combination of:
- Hosts file blocking, (locally via AdAway or remotely using a DNS provider like AdGuard or NextDNS)
- A local VPN type with application firewall, (such as NetGuard or AdGuard)
The first will “null route” network connections which don’t need to be made, resulting in negligible to no network utilisation. The second will stop apps being able to utilise the radios all altogether.
The more network connections you block/restrict/limit, the better your battery life will be versus not doing so under exactly the same conditions.
A VPN connection would use more battery to encrypt/decrypt all communication. But in practice I would think it would be next to negligible.
Still shows ads for me
That’s actually terrible advice for normal people. Why? Because it’s not going to work half the time. It might not even work all the time in your home, but then God help you if you’re in a McDonald’s or something and they refuse to let you actually use the Wi-Fi until you disable your private DNS service, which you then forget to turn on until the next time you see an ad. If it actually worked constantly, like if you modified the host file for instance, it would be a great piece of advice for the average user. But it’s just such a hassle and a pain in the ass to deal with that normal people will hate that their Wi-Fi never works in certain places or even sometimes doesn’t work at home.
More importantly, DNS ad block is only really good at blocking, well, ads. Sure, it will block most visible ads, but the problem is that if you’re more privacy conscious and also want to block tracking, if your DNS filters were actually any good at that then some apps would just straight up break. When you’re able to have blocking on a per app basis, you can have much better results. It’s way on top of using AdGuard DNS, I have the duck duck go tracker radar, but I might just switch back to using blockada 5.0 and using both the standard list and the duck duck go tracker radar, gives me the best of both worlds without having to worry about my internet connection not being available when I want to make a payment and McDonald’s. I don’t know why the hell tracker radar doesn’t also do ad blocking, it seems pretty obvious to do. And don’t like the other apps, it does a good job of showing you the big scary number of times it tries to track you. On the other hand, some apps can work with ad block but would probably break with tracking protection, and as far as I know no apps let you choose which filters to apply to specific apps, So maybe actually I’m doing the smarter thing by using a DNS and tracking protection from duck duck go.