Harrison

LGR has a Patreon, I signed up and sent over fifty bucks. Least I could do for the many, many years of entertainment.

https://www.patreon.com/LazyGameReviews

Yeah that'll block all ads and trackers that're possible without severe annoyance with a non fingerprinted browser etc.

Specifically, the way iOS content blocking works is guaranteed safe. All it does is write to a file loaded by the Safari browser to block content, the app can't do anything at all itself. No indication any VPN sold by AdGuard (or the local device-wide fake VPN) is particularly unsafe that I've seen.

There's zero evidence of any wrongdoing or shadiness other than them having employees living in Russia. The company itself moved to Cyprus, many of their engineers left Russia, none of their servers are physically located in Russia, and they publicly disavowed Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

This doesn't mean Russia couldn't apply massive pressure by threatening family members, etc, of course, but I personally have no concerns at this time and use AdGuard Home (their local adblocking DNS server) in my LAN and their iOS app on my devices. The iOS app in particular uses Apple's content-blocking Safari tech so it should be completely safe so long as you don't pay for a VPN or use a local VPN to block everything outside Safari.

If you're rooted on Android, definitely use AdAway instead, it just replaces the hosts file.

https://adguard.com/en/blog/official-response-to-setapp.html

Facebook is terrible obviously but this is a good thing because they have tremendous resources to defend against Apple’s lawyers and that could open the door to less evil app stores in the EU. Competition is good, always.