3 Android Ad Blockers to Speed Up Your Browsing on Mobile

Advertising is the “necessary evil” of the internet. Without it, there would be no true incentive for the many content publishers online to flood us with high-quality articles, clips, and podcasts. This doesn’t make advertising any less annoying – especially when you are on mobile data that (unfortunately) can be pretty expensive.

Luckily, there are ways in which you can reduce the number of ads your phone shows you – or eliminate them completely – thus speeding up your internet connection and turning your mobile browsing experience into a much better one. Here are a few apps that can help you with that.

AppBrain Ad Detector

AppBrain Ad Detector is a very useful piece of software available in Google’s Play Store. It’s not an ad blocker but an app that can detect “annoyances” like push notification ads and spam icons, and also verifies which apps on your phone are enrolled in various ad networks or use social SDKs for Twitter, Facebook, and others.

While it doesn’t block the ads, it helps you identify apps that might annoy you with them, helping you get rid of them and look for alternatives.

Adblock Plus for Firefox

One of the most requested features for Android’s built-in Chrome browser is the possibility to use add-ons, just like on the desktop version. Chrome’s developers are behind on this one, though. There is, in turn, a simple solution: switching to Firefox.

Firefox is a browser with a very good track record when it comes to browsing while respecting your privacy, having several features built into it from the start. And you can further improve it by installing add-ons (something not available on Chrome yet).

And since you have the browser to support add-ons, you can simply install Adblock Plus, the mobile version of the popular desktop browser extension.

Adblock Plus is as capable on Android as it is on desktop browsers: it can block popups and annoying ads, thus reducing your data consumption and speeding up your browsing, and it will also reduce the risk of “malvertising” (ads that can drop malware on your device), improve your privacy even further, and offer an overall better online browsing experience.

Blokada

Blokada is a free, open-source ad-blocking solution for Android phones that can block not only the most obtrusive and invasive ads but also filter out malware and trackers. Through its many filters, you can not only reduce the cost of your data plan but also browse the web feeling safer. And the best part is, it doesn’t only work in browsers – it can do its magic across all the apps on your phone.

The slim version of the Blokada is available on Google Play. The full version doesn’t comply with Google’s business model, so it can’t be listed there – but it can be downloaded from the developer’s website or alternative app marketplaces and repositories like F-Droid or XDA Labs. To install it, you’ll have to enable “Unknown sources”, though.