Hello Invidious, my old friend.

I’ve been meaning to learn how to sabotage the pump to get the ads to not even play. It’s on the list of anarchist things to do.

Literally though! This is literally the entire reason I got fed up with ads! What’s the point if I’m too poor to buy the junk they’re hawking?!

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There are a couple of VPNs with built-in DNS blocking for advertisements. Athena is a solution that uses your phone’s VPN functionality to route traffic served from known ad networks into a digital brick wall like Roadrunner baiting Wile E. Coyote into a painted tunnel.

Brave is run by a fascist tech oligarch. They’re still collecting your data to send to ad companies, they’re not even half as ‘privacy respecting’ as they claim to be. If you’re an American, you should be worried. Those ad companies are, by extension, selling their data to the government to bypass the 4th Amendment.

Brave doesn’t do anything that uBlock Origin and Mullvad don’t already do better.

It’s happening, it’s just taking a little time.

Sounds like the OS is the last bridge you need to burn, then! Welcome to the FOSS side of the Force!

Installing it works best with standard vanilla Chromium. If you have issues, it may be because you don’t have ADB or the Android SDK installed on your computer. Just follow the directions, and it will run itself. Its simplicity is honestly a thing of beauty. And if you fuck up, you can (almost) always flash it back to stock Android with Google’s own WebUSB application.

After that? Getting a launcher that can install custom icons was a priority for me personally. I’ve heard awesome things about Lawnchair, but Pear Launcher is nice too. Aurora Store is a must if you don’t want the Play Store but still want play store apps (disclosure: It undermines some of the important security features of your phone’s setup to do this, and the GOS devs themselves strongly condemn the practice. F-droid and Obtainium are, imho, the better solution for most things. But also, bank apps and Discord are essential for me.) Shelter from F-Droid is an excellent tool that lets you set up certain apps in a work profile, which makes toggling certain apps on and off very easy so it uses even less bandwidth and battery power.

For apps, I recommend the following replacements:

• Play Store -> Accrescent and F-Droid

• Images -> Aves Libre

• Maps -> CoMaps, Organic Maps, or OsmAND

• Google Translate -> SimplyTranslate

• Weather -> BreezyWeather

• YouTube -> PipePipe or Clipious

• Keyboard -> HeliBoard

• Stock utility apps -> Fossify from F-Droid

Beyond that, just enjoy it. It’s so simple and so quiet. I mean mentally quiet. So few pop-ups, so little fuss, it’s remarkably pleasant.

Absolute hero here.