Additionally to NetGuard, you also can use RethinkDNS, it does the same thing as NetGuard with a local DNS for ad blocking and some other advanced stuff.
Cool, I’ll look into that as well. Thank you.
NetGaurd.
Others have said it, I'll say it again.
It gives seperate control over WiFi and cell. So for example my weather widget won't update in background over cell, but on WiFi it can update all day.
Only downside is it takes up your 1 VPN "slot", which might be a bad thing if you a vpn.
I am not rooted and running NetGuard on my phone.
Like it quite a bit, gets a bit wobbly on my setup when roaming but happy with it.
Are there any system apps that are worth blocking that won't make my phone less useful? Kind of an ambiguous question, I know. I just blocked GBoard, for one.
Oh, never mind. It uses a pseudo VPN to filter traffic, and I'm using an actual VPN, so its not compatible. I only learned this after setting up some rules and finally trying to enable it.
It'd be cool if they integrated a VPN client into the app.
You should check out RethinkDNS
it's on F-Droid and has everything you need
Nice! I'll have to try it out.
It's working! Thanks! I got Mullvad configured inside Rethink, and blocked Gboard from the internet. I was enjoying HeliBoard, but it doesn't have emoji search. ☹️ Also, autocorrect on HeliBoard was pretty bad. A combination of too aggressive and not aggressive enough at times. Plus the "swipe spacebar to select text" feature of HeliBoard never felt as good as Gboard.
Of course, now I can't use the GIF feature of GBoard, which was another occasionally useful feature.
Man, does Rethink have a lot of options and settings. Definitely not for the faint of heart!
I also blocked "Speech Recognition and Synthesis from Google" which I think is used when you do voice typing. Voice typing is still working, so that's good. It does most of it locally. Except I noticed months ago that if I have a very spotty cell connection, Voice Typing takes forever to initialize. I thought it was fully on-device at all times, but it turns out it's not.
Anyone else know some other things I should block? I blocked Chrome because I never use it and I pretty much immediately saw it was using the Internet in the background when I enabled Rethink.
Cool, thanks! I will take a look at it.
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