Thanks again for your repky c_C!
I again found that enabling the smart list setting seems to disable ad blocking on my phone. From reading the description, it’ may be the this is to be expected for a while, until it starts functioning as intended, but I haven’t had issues with it disabled so I have disabled it again.
I spent several hours today experimenting with clearing the log and running the app, whitelisting or blacklisting hosts as seemed appropriate. I turned off CNAME blocking per your last post. I found three obvious ad or tracker hosts that, if blocked, would trip the ad block detection if they were accessed by the app. If they were whitelisted, ads would be displayed. I am unsure now how a.admob.com comes into it, but I have only ever seen that accessed by this app (and being blocked). Something that confuses me is that I found an access from another app to e.reddit.com (being blocked by one of the block lists), which I believe is also an unresolved domain, the same as a.admob.com, but Blokada WILL allow me to whitelist that. In any event, I don’t really use the app in question that often, and have burnt myself out on working on this, so I have excluded the app.
There are a couple of other issues I’d like to mention though. In all my experimentation, I found that it is very easy he end up with a host being both blacklisted and whitelisted at the same time. I am unsure which takes priority. I think this is caused when, for example, I whitelist a host in the host log that has already been manually blacklisted, so it then gets whitelisted, but not removed from the blacklist (which I would expect to happen).
The second issue is specifically related to Samsung phones to my knowledge. It was a known issue that when a VPN was used, Samsung One UI would add a persistent, non-removable notification of that VPN being in use. Therefore, whenever I was using Blokada, there was a notification showing me it was active. I received system software update on my phone today including an update to One UI and discovered that it no longer issues a notification when VPN is active. For other VPNs this is fine, because they issue their own notification when they are active and remove it when they are inactive. However, the only persistent notification that Blokada issues is the ‘keep alive’ notification, if enabled. The problem is that if Blokada is disabled, the ‘keep alive’ notification remains, so it can’t be told from the status bar if Blokada is disabled. It would be nice if this could somehow be addressed, so it would be easy to tell from the status bar when Blokada is or isn’t active.
By the way, I just want to mention that I love Blokada and recommend it to people all the time. It is even better than AdAway was on my rooted phone. Apart from the Play Store issue, I am amazed that more people don’t use it.
