Blokada 5 for Android is blocking Kore but not showing that it does on the Activity log!

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Blokada, been running on my Android phone for years, love it. It’s awesome and cleans things up beautifully. Thanks enormously Blokada (though I’m on 5 because as we all lament, 6 has no free tier).

I use the Kore app as well, and have also for years, Kore is an Android app for remote controlling a Kodi instance (a popular media - audio, video, images - management package)…

I love it too.

And both have been working beautifully for years.

Kore stopped working lately. Just couldn’t connect to my Kodi server. And so I set about finding out why. Standard procedure, of rebooting (and that would sometimes fix it, but not always - so I settled for trying that for a while on the off chance I got joy), sometimes changing my WAP (I have a few WAPs to choose from in house) which again brought intermittent joy, I found after reconnecting to a new WAP sometimes Kore could connect to Kodi.

Then one day recently I had no luck with those two and had an epiphany, I’ll deactivate Blokada. And then it connected. So Is et about repeating that, and indeed I now have clear steps to reproduce, it is reliable and every time hit. Deactivate Blokada and Kore connects.

Blokada autostarts on my phone, because I want it up, it is so useful. But sometimes for some reason I notice it isn’t activated after I start my phone and I have to activate it (I notice this by the ads that bother me). SO clearly there’s an occasional or always window of time between startup and Blokada activating, and it may be that switching WAPs has a similar effect upon Blokada.

Either way. I want to keep Blokada running, so now if I start Kore and it won’t connect, I open Blokada, and check the Activity log. And lo and behold what do I see? I see the connection Kore made to my server indeed. But it’s green, and not blocked!

Here I was hoping to find it red, and whitelisting it. But not it registers and is green and let through.

In fact if Blokada is running eventually Kore will disconnect, and if I look at the Activity log I’ll see not clue as to anything blocked, but if I ask Kore to reconnect manuallu, then the green access to my server appears in the Activity log but Kore still fails to connect. Deactivate Blokada and then Kore connects.

That makes it mighty hard to decide which if any of the filternig rules are blocking it. And what is being blocked. I wonder what tools are available to diagnose further. Kore and Blokada have been working together fine for years, and only recently are they at odds and Blokada and Kore both refuse to offer any clues as to why.

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Hi there,

Thanks for the detailed report, I’ve read that you tried whitelisting some entries related to Kodi, have you tried whitelisting the Kodi app on settings → apps?

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I use adblock5

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Interesting, does that work on Android and block OS wide? I mean, Blokada is so cool because it works phone wide. I have free games I like to play and they seem to mostly to be written in such an accommodating way, that when they try to fetch their ads for the dancing banner that consumes screen space and distracts, they don’t even leave a blank banner, Ir disappears completely and the game fills the screen. It rocks.

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Hey, thanks for that! It worked. Awesome! It’s under Advanced > Apps, and the interface a tad unintuitive (displays empty list for Installed) but typing Kore in the search box brings it up, tapping it, labels it (bypassed) and then testing Kore yields fruit! I even rebooted the phone, checked Blokada was active, and then started Kore fresh and it connected fine.

Thanks enormously for this tip.

I have a feeling there is still a Blokada bug somewhere as it is clearly blocking some Kore request or other, yet only listing one request and flagging it green (not blocked). No surprise it’s green it’s a local LAN server, with a local LAN IP (192.168.0.x) that it’s accessing. Which lends the suspicion that either:

  1. Kore is making some other web request that is blocked but not listed (which would be good to know, maybe the app is doing some spying even -not likely, it’s FOSS and a good community but this behaviour is suspicious - i.e failing to connect when Blokada lists only a green connection) .

  2. Blokada alters the request or response in some subtle way as it passes through that bugs Kodi or Kore.

  3. Blokada is blocking the request but listing it green.

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