Avoid AdBlock Plus for Android!

[Deozaan]

Hi folks,

Today my mom asked me how to check how much data she was using on her phone, so while I was walking her through the process, I followed the steps on my own tablet and came to a shocking discovery:

AdBlock Plus has consumed almost 60GB of data in the past 30 days since I installed it:



The two apps that follow behind at 10.5GB and 2.75GB are (in reverse order) Titanium Backup, which backs up my device and uploads the backup to cloud storage, and Sync, which syncs the backups to my PC. And the only reason Sync used up so much was because when I downgraded from 2.0 yesterday, I had to re-sync all the files again (about 6GB) to my devices.

In other words, the rightfully most bandwidth heavy apps only used ~2.75GB and 4GB (under normal circumstances) of data in the past 30 days. Yet for some reason an app that is supposed to be saving me bandwidth by stopping ads from downloading at all is somehow using nearly 60GB of data!

And it would be nice if it even worked. But I still have ads on my device.

So I've uninstalled it, and I'm putting out the warning to others in case they are using it, not realizing the potential damage it could have on their data plans.

[mouser]

that is insane if it's real..
but i wonder if it's some kind of mistake -- like if Adblock Plus was filtering all traffic and the Data usage calculator ended up double counting all bandwidth and assigning it all to Adblock Plus?  just a thought because that number seems insane.

[rgdot]

60GB in 30 days can't be right, something like mouse's explanation must be the case, surely?

[Deozaan]

I suppose that if it is something like what mouser explained, it's not that the bandwidth was counted wrong. I compared the bandwidth on certain dates with my router's bandwidth log and they match up. But perhaps the bandwidth on my tablet was attributed to the wrong source? I suppose it's possible that the majority of that bandwidth belongs to the Netflix app, as my wife does like having Netflix going while she's doing other things.

But I still don't understand how it could do that. First of all, the Netflix app doesn't have any ads. Secondly, she has a separate user account on my tablet, so it calculates her bandwidth separately than mine. Additionally, AdBlock Plus isn't installed for her on her account, so it shouldn't be filtering her Netflix app anyway.

[mouser]

It sounds like we need an answer from AdBlock..

[4wd]

Isn't it that ABPfA is acting as a proxy on Android?

Therefore practically all your tablets traffic is going to appear to be originating from that app.

[mouser]

Appears to be an issue that has been raised before:

https://adblockplus....iewtopic.php?t=11849

https://adblockplus.org/en/android-faq
Why does Adblock Plus appear to consume so much traffic?
To filter ads, all traffic has to pass through Adblock Plus. Android considers this to be the traffic caused by the app, while it is in reality the sum of all traffic.

Note that the posters on that thread still don't seem in agreement about the nature of the bandwidth.. some say adblock plus is eating bandwidth, some say its just a reporting problem..

[4wd]

FWIW, I use AdAway which updates the hosts file to loopback any ad servers - probably not as all-encompassing as ABPfA is supposed to be but then it doesn't use any CPU cycles or data unless I'm running it to update the hosts file.

[Deozaan]

Appears to be an issue that has been raised before:

https://adblockplus....iewtopic.php?t=11849

https://adblockplus.org/en/android-faq
Why does Adblock Plus appear to consume so much traffic?
To filter ads, all traffic has to pass through Adblock Plus. Android considers this to be the traffic caused by the app, while it is in reality the sum of all traffic.

Note that the posters on that thread still don't seem in agreement about the nature of the bandwidth.. some say adblock plus is eating bandwidth, some say its just a reporting problem..

-mouser (March 04, 2015, 06:20 PM)

That link led to this one, which may be a major contributor to the issues I'm noticing:

I installed Adblock Plus yesterday before watching some streaming video in MxPlayer on the bus ride home. After seeking a few times to get to my place in the video, I was able to watch a few minutes of video, but was running into major buffering issues. I got through maybe 5 minutes of video over 15-20 minutes. After, I stopped watching the video, I noticed that Adblock Plus was still downloading.

When I got home, I saw that Adblock Plus had used 550MB of data, over the half hour that I had it installed. The entire video would have been around 200MB. I'm wondering if there is an issue with Adblock Plus not terminating connections, and that it continued to download the different parts of the video stream after I had seeked to a different position. This would explain the bandwidth usage and the buffering issues. There were no other applications installed that would have been using that much data. After uninstalling Adblock Plus, the issue went away.

-https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=11790

It seems Adblock may not terminate the connection when dealing with streaming video, so if you do any seeking, the video will continue to download to completion from where you were before seeking, as well as to the place you were after seeking. And if you seek multiple times, you're creating multiple simultaneous download streams that eat up data like crazy!

FWIW, I use AdAway which updates the hosts file to loopback any ad servers - probably not as all-encompassing as ABPfA is supposed to be but then it doesn't use any CPU cycles or data unless I'm running it to update the hosts file.

-4wd (March 04, 2015, 06:39 PM)

I've used AdAway and AdFree in the past, but for some reason I can't get them to block ads anymore, so that's why I installed ABDfA. In fact, I still have AdAway and Adfree installed. Yet nothing seems to block ads on my Nexus 7 2013 so I guess I might as well uninstall it all.

[4wd]

What ads are you talking about?

Ones that appear in the browser(s) or that are pushed through to apps?

Just asking because I rarely see any ads, apps that don't need net access are blocked via the firewall from ever accessing the net, (even if they think they do need it).

There's also various AirPush ad framework detectors if you want to see what apps are using them.  (After running New AirPush Detector over my tablet all it could find was K-9 Email which pushes notifications).

[Deozaan]

I used to never see ads in the browser or before YouTube videos, or in other apps. Now they're everywhere. In apps, in the browser, before YouTube videos. Everywhere.

[Tuxman]

I've been using AdGuard (also on Android) for a while which only consumed 103 megabytes of traffic during the past 30 days. I guess it's not a technical issue with ad blockers in general then.

[Innuendo]

I've used AdAway and AdFree in the past, but for some reason I can't get them to block ads anymore, so that's why I installed ABDfA. In fact, I still have AdAway and Adfree installed. Yet nothing seems to block ads on my Nexus 7 2013 so I guess I might as well uninstall it all.

-Deozaan (March 04, 2015, 07:12 PM)

I once had an Android device that was in that state. Finally had to do a reinstall/'factory reset' and then AdAway worked once more.

[Deozaan]

I've used AdAway and AdFree in the past, but for some reason I can't get them to block ads anymore, so that's why I installed ABDfA. In fact, I still have AdAway and Adfree installed. Yet nothing seems to block ads on my Nexus 7 2013 so I guess I might as well uninstall it all.

-Deozaan (March 04, 2015, 07:12 PM)

I once had an Android device that was in that state. Finally had to do a reinstall/'factory reset' and then AdAway worked once more.

-Innuendo (March 08, 2015, 11:16 AM)

I remember ad blocking broke when I updated the OS to KitKat. It had something to do with the location of the hosts file changing or something similar. I managed to get it to work again using AdAway in combination with Adfree. But then I updated my tablet to Lollipop and ad blocking stopped working again. Lollipop had too many bugs and annoyances, so I "retrograded" back to KitKat (Cyanogenmod 11) but I still can't get ad blocking to work.