Block Ads in Apps on Android

I'm using Pi-Hole on an Ubiquiti router together with WireGuard and DNSSEC. My Synology NAS is backup (with regards to the DNS-based Pi-Hole blocking) taking the adblocking load off the router (there's no redundancy for WireGuard endpoint though). I don't (need) to use a RPi anymore. It works extremely well for me, and all my clients also get to connect to Nextcloud running on the Synology.

My setup does far more than just blocking ads, and works transparent as long as the client is connected through WireGuard (which works seamlessly over LTE and public WiFi).

That being said, I really like how Blokada and DNS66 are available in F-Droid [1] [2], and require minimal technical knowledge to set up. The more [ad blocking], the merrier.

As a backup measure I use Firefox with uBlock. The only machine I don't use uBlock is on Kali because I want to see the website exactly as it is being served.

[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/org.blokada.alarm/

[2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/

I've been considering setting up pihole on my home server for a while but I've always been worried that it would break a website for a non-technical family member while I wasn't there to fix it. How has your experience with website breakage been?

Also, how has your experience with wire guard been? I've been using my vpn's default client on all my individual devices out of convenience but after looking at the wire guard website I can see the appeal.

The only site I've seen break was Burrow ironically enough, couldn't get through the checkout flow which is pretty darn stupid for a purchased product.

Our solution is simple, we've got two SSIDs, one w/ PH, one without. They route to separate VLANs and each VLAN uses a different gateway+DHCP with pihole or standard DNS. Fixing a website that doesn't work is simple as hopping over on another SSID.

We're using UniFi gear for the wifi, they support 4 SSIDs(8 if you split 2.4/5Ghz) per access point and USG made it trivial to setup multiple gateways(now on pfSense but that's a whole nother discussion).

Regarding the web, browser based blocking still makes more sense. If I have 2 tabs one which works with adblock and one which does not I can simply click an icon to enable ads on the one. Changing networks seems like a pain in the neck.

On the flip side I've got 4 different devices across 3 operating systems, but putting it at the DNS layer it just works.

FWIW I've been running pihole for almost a year, aside from the issue with Burrow and some social media redirect links used to track(that I want to block) I've not had any other false positives.