Would you mind sharing the details? I’d love to have more effective ad blocking on my phone
'Nother one who uses VPN strictly for connecting my employer-issued computer with the employer’s network.
I do fine with avoiding phishing sites on my own, Nord. (A recent NordVPN commercial touts their ability to avoid phishing sites; I’d provide an example but I can’t seem to find it online.)
It’s just an app called ReThink DNS, which lets you set up a custom DNS server that allows you to block whatever you want. Like most adblock software that runs without root, it technically installs a VPN on your phone so it can control the connection.
This is used in combination with apps like YouTube ReVanced and other patches. And you can also use browsers like Firefox to have adblocking inside of them.
This is another common use of VPNs. As @BigT says, there is lots of phone software that pretends to be a VPN, because that is the only non-jailbreak method of hijacking the phones network connection. The software then can implement DNS based ad block lists, and some have more sophisticated firewall type function.
However, I don’t use software like that, because I want to run a real VPN, and the phone only allows one VPN at a time. The better, but more difficult to implement, solution is to redirect your phone’s DNS to a DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TLS server that uses a DNS based ad blocking list.
Modern Android and IOS both have ways of configuring DoH (only on IOS) or DoT (on both). This has some downsides. The two biggest are that it can interfere with captive portal type WiFi logins, and that ad blocking can break some websites and apps.
On both systems, temporarily disabling private DNS and using the default one provided by whatever network you’re on is pretty easy. The hard part is recognizing the cause of the problem and taking steps to correct it. For example: login to Wi-Fi network, captive portal login won’t load, disconnect from Wi-Fi, disable private DNS, reconnect to Wi-Fi, login at captive portal, re-enable private DNS. If that’s something you do frequently it can get annoying, but for the rare hotel stay or whatever, it isn’t a big deal.
For my private DNS I use a pi-hole in the cloud that I control. The only good reason to do it myself is I can control the block lists. There are several free and paid services that will do similar, such as AdGuard, linked below.
The ad blocking is not perfect, but it is pretty good, and has the large advantage of blocking ads in any app, not just while browsing.
In Mopsian fashion, when I connect to work from home.
I tried once to use it, and never had any success. When I went to Europe in 2022, I got a month’s subrscription of one of the big name legit VPNs so I could surf and stream from the Canadian sites on my iPad. And it was a colossal waste of money. If I tried to activate it, basically nothing else worked on the tablet. Like, even Google would just be dead. After a couple of days I just stopped trying.
This is what I tend to do on my phone. And I used to do it on Dad’s, but he would have trouble with the Internet not working when he would use various Internet hotspots. And while I showed him how to disable the Private DNS, it just wasn’t the best experience. It’s easy to forget to turn it back on until you see ads, and then you have to go around deleting caches and stuff to make sure none of the ads stuck around when you turn it back on.
I’m actually thinking about using it myself. The thing with ReThink is that it has a lot of other options that do a lot of what I would use a VPN for anyways. The main exception would be geospoofing (where you can pretend to be somewhere else in the world), but we don’t really do that on phones.
I’m not too worried about using public wi-fi anymore, since anything uses HTTPS now. (I even force it by default.) They’d have to spoof a certificate to pull anything off.
Every day. Couple of years ago, there was a website, I forget which, that was geographically restricted, so I have a vpn now(apple’s vpn service didn’t have any affect on the restriction, typical) that I pay a small fee for yearly.
All the time for my connection to work–that’s probably not the kind of VPN you were thinking about.
I also use Surfshark regularly to handle weird things that are usually related to DNS from my home setup. If there is a web page that just doesn’t behave and I suspect it’s because all of my ad blocking stuff (e.g. Pi-hole) is possibly blocking some required script, then I’ll flip on VPN and see if the page works. That functions because VPN uses its own DNS and bypasses things like the home Pi-hole.
For the most part, tools like Surfshark are a first line of defense when you are using strange Wi-Fi networks. When traveling, I will always use a VPN if possible while at hotels. This helps keep the bad folks away from my activities.
If you set up your phone to autoconnect to known Wi-Fi, you ought to also set it up to autoconnect to VPN. This is because one of the simplest ways to compromise Wi-Fi is for an attacker to pose as a legitimate Wi-Fi network (e.g. Starbucks) that your phone knows, and your phone will quietly glom onto their imposter network, even if you are nowhere near a Starbucks.
I use a work VPN daily to connect to my client’s systems.
When I traveled for work I had a dedicated repeater to connect to my hotel wi-fi that would shunt all my traffic through a VPN server (PIA)
And personally, I play a couple of region-locked games that I’ll fire up PIA for on my gamer. But only when gaming because Google is a PITA with CAPTCHA when it sees you’re on VPN.