Adguard and Adguard Pro for iOS v1.2.0

This is an especially exciting update for Adguard Pro users, but those who use regular Adguard for iOS will find some pleasant changes too — of note, the User filter has been made much easier in use.

Common changes

There are a couple of noteworthy changes that deserve a special mention, and since I’ve touched on it already, let’s begin with the User filter rework.

New User filter

If you are an avid custom rules creator, you know how painfully slow and inconvenient inputting rules one by one used to be, and it was the only way you could edit, add or delete your custom rules. Well, now there is one big text field and it’s possible to copy&paste a bunch of rules at once:

Note that there is also a search feature. Type any text (a domain name, for example), press ’Search’ button, and the matching rules will be highlighted.

Size reduction

There is surprisingly little to say about the change this important. The size of the application has dropped from ~60Mb to ~15Mb for regular Adguard and from ~100Mb to less than 20Mb for Adguard Pro. All this was achieved strictly by optimization, none of the apps’ functions were cut. There is literally no drawback for the user!

New localizations

We continue to place the accessibility of Adguard for users all over the world high among our priorities. This time some new localizations were added from scratch and others were updated. Now such languages as Chinese Traditional, Portuguese (Brazil), Bulgarian, Estonian, Hungarian and Croatian are available.

I need to point out that all Adguard translations are done by volunteers. You too can help us translate Adguard into your native language or proofread the existing translation. In case you are interested, find more info here.

Pro changes

That’s where we put the most efforts in, specifically into this one brand new feature:

System-wide filtering

There’s quite a lot to tell (and show!) about it, so to kick things off, I’ll start with describing the basics.

Just like the already-familiar Adguard DNS, it is capable of filtering traffic of all apps and browsers on your device. But there’re many differences. The main one is that System-wide ad blocking does not require you to use any DNS service at all, the traffic is filtered right on your device.

Filtering is based on the ’Simplified domain names filter’, and your whitelist/blacklist settings.

>Note: it doesn’t matter if ’Simplified domain names filter’ is enabled in the ’Filters’ section or not. If System-wide ad blocking is enabled, it will be used anyway.

Simply toggle the ’Pro’ switch to turn it on (in case it is the very first time you run Adguard Pro, it’ll ask you for the permission to add VPN configurations):

As you can notice, the interface was considerably altered to reflect the changes. There’s now a master switch for all Pro functions that establishes a fake VPN connection. Again: no traffic is routed through any remote servers.

Good news for the more geeky type: System-wide filtering is flexible. At your service are whitelist and blacklist, which you can use to adjust the ad blocking to your liking. By the way, this brings us to the next topic:

Filtering log

This is another neat addition that deserves a separate introduction. It is a successor to the DNS requests log, as it allows to see every single request which was handled by Adguard.

The best part is that you can choose any request in the filtering log and immediately toss it into the blacklist, or vice versa — find a blocked one and whitelist it in one tap. Comes really handy if you are willing to spend a little bit of effort on customizing the filtering process.

Despite the filtering log is located on the System-wide ad blocking screen, it works even if you prefer the good old DNS filtering. Sure, the Whitelist/Blacklist won’t matter, but you’ll be able to see all the requests perfectly fine. Speaking of DNS filtering...

Custom DNS settings

Adguard DNS is still available, of course, both ’Default’ and ’Family protection’ modes. For it to work, the ’PRO’ master switch has to be toggled on, just like it was shown in the part about System-wide ad blocking.

Once you get to the ’DNS settings’ screen, besides Adguard DNS configurations you’ll see a bunch of other preset DNS servers to choose from. For example, if you are a dedicated OpenDNS user, you’ll be glad to find both OpenDNS Home and OpenDNS Family Shield available to you.

It is impossible not to mention the possibility to add any custom DNS server that you prefer over the default ones. You can even add multiple and switch between them in a single tap at your convenience.

And that should be enough to play with until the next release! :) Please let me know in the comments what do you think about the new features and which you would like to see added next.