I have a Huawei Mate 20 Pro phone with Android 10 / Miui 10.1. I used v4 of Blokada without any problems for many months. It blocked me about 600,000 ads based on its counter, so it was very useful. Blokada v5 always switches off in the background after a few minutes, even if I am actively using the phone and ads start showing up in some apps (e.g. e-book reader I am reading). v4 was working well and consistently, v5 does not.
Some more data:
I have downloaded the apk from a third party server, I am NOT using the Play Store version
The Huawei Store auto-update is DISABLED, so that shouldn’t trigger the auto-update from v4 to v5 either
The Blokada app has been whitelisted so the phone does / should not auto-optimize battery usage and kill the app. All app/battery related permissions in v5 are the same as they were in v4, which worked well.
Because v5 does not stay open, I have downloaded v4.9 and reverted back to it. Regardless of the above actions (no Play store, no auto-update etc.), v4 gets updates to v5 within hours (or minutes) without my consent! My understanding was that updating to v5 is OPTIONAL! Any idea:
Why v5 is being closed off all the time? (when v4 did not)
More importantly, how can I STOP the app from auto-updating from v4 to v5. I personally prefer v4 as it seems more feature rich than v5, but that’s just my preference.
Hello there. This “forced” update should be a one time thing
If you still have your old blokada 5 installed even if you already applied 5.x over it, go to blokada.org and download Blokada 4.9 (or 4.11) and your old settings and counter should migrate to it losing nothing in the process.
As for why Blokada 5 has issues blocking ads or running in the background on Huawei devices, we have EMUI to thank for that, specifically 9 & 10 they are notorious for killing apps that run in the background even if they are excluded from battery optimization.
Some possible solutions to that might be available at DontKillMyApp.com
To be more precise, there is no forced update to v5. If you have v4, you’ll just see an update notification for a while, which you can safely ignore.
That said, Huawei app store is so “smart” to just auto update apps by their package name. Since you probably have it, and the version available on Huawei app store is the v5, it gets auto updated. As @murdock86 said, you can download the v4 from our homepage, which will prevent this auto update.
Thank you for all the answers and tips. The problem has been finally solved by completely disabling and signing out of the Huawei App store (I haven’t been using it anyway), as opposed to just ticking the box of not allowing apps to auto-update, which apparently they did on wi-fi connection anyway. After signing out of the Huawei app store the Blokada v4 stopped auto-updating, now stays open in the background and does the job as it should.
