Great battery saving mode of Adguard for Android

In this article we would like to tell you about one important feature of Adguard for Android. It's a possibility to completely(!) disable filtering for all network connections. At first it may seem strange. What is the point of configuring Adguard so that nothing is filtered? What will it do then? We will try to explain it right away.

Note that the following instruction works in Adguard for Android versions 2.8.53+ only. You can download it here or just switch to Beta update channel in Adguard Settigns -> Advanced -> Update channel -> Beta.

TLDR: by slightly changing Adguard settings, you can turn it to the blocker with zero resources consumption. The truth is that nothing good happens that easily, so, yeah, the quality of filtering will be somewhat decreased.

DNS requests filtering

More than a year ago, we added a 'DNS filtering' feature to Adguard. In order to understand its meaning, let's first examine what DNS is and how it works.

If an app or browser wants to refer to any domain (ad or not), first it retrieves the address on which that domain is located from DNS server.

With DNS filtering enabled, Adguard intercepts every DNS request and returns 'blocking' response if the request happens to be from ad or tracking server.

Main advantage of this approach: it is very economical/saving. It's enough to block the domain one time and within an hour this address will no longer be requested.

Main disadvantage: it is very “rough”. Let us explain:

For example, we have an ad domain 'addomain.org'.

On most sites it is blocked without problems.