Privacy

I have been using the hosts file based ad blocker AdAway for at least two years. It runs on my smartphones and tablet, all rooted, thus I can run a VPN simultaneously. Since it has always worked flawlessly, I never really took the time to compare it to other similar apps.

I lot of the hostnames or IP addresses that your android devices connect to without your direct knowledge or consent(1) are hard to find anything relevant about, except for the fact that Google owns a lot of the domains and IP ranges. This article helped me a lot when deciding which end points to block(2).