How to hack Android to disable or block Ads on Applications manually [hosts file] Rooted and Unrooted devices

Advertisements are the most annoying things you have to face when you have internet connection on your android phone. This becomes a great trouble if it irritates the user by filling almost 33% of the available space on your screen with ads. So it is time to hack hack your phone to block the ads. It can block almost all ads showing on your Internet Browser, or even in the top of Games!.

I have 1 more thing to say before we start. Blocking ads is not actually legal. It is for earning money for Developers who publish the app for free. In most of the apps there is an option to give some money, you can upgrade anytime to remove ads. Anyway, you can read below to block ads on your device






There are two things you can do for a rooted phone. Either Download a free ready made app for this porpose or do it manually, both of them has its own advantages and disadvantages.
For a ready made app like adblock. It can remove ads by one click. Butt you cannot add new sites manually by this trick alone. For a newbie, I recommend to do this for a newbie. If you are an advanced user and want more in this, you can try the second method. Actually, if you prefer any method, the actual thing happening in the background is same, editing hosts file.
 

AdAway is the best ad blocking tool so far. You just download the app from Market and install it. Follow the on -screen instructions and you're done! Nothing more to worry and think. Also thereis option in the app to add exceptions or to add new ad networks. To add new ad network to block, just add the domain name of the ad into the blacklist of adaway, for eg: ads.doubleclick.net

Also be careful that don't add your regular sites like google.com, blogspot.com etc. into their blacklist. This will block all requests going to this domains thinking that it is the URL of ad network. This means you willnot be able to access Gmail, Maps etc. if you add google.com into the list because these sites are hosted under google.com domain. If you dont understand this part, just leave it.

Hosts file is situated in system/etc/hosts in the root folder. It contains information about some URLs and redirecting IPs. You don't want to bother about that much. Just add 127.0.0.1 followed by ad network's domain address one by one into it. There are thousands of ad networks available. So it is not practical to add it one by one. So I collected the domains if all networks and uploaded it as a hosts file. You just download the hosts.txt file from below and replace it with the original hosts file on root://system:/etc/hosts. If you want, you can add more networks into the list.

Download Hosts.txt from Jumbofiles : Download


As I already said, the basic thing of blocking ad is editing hosts file and which is not possible in unrooted mobile. Don't be panic, still there are options available for this. But this won't be as easy as above.
If you want to block ads on your Internet Browser, you can use an Ad block plugin for this

Opera Mobile is the other choice. First, create a file called urlfilter.ini somewhere on your SD card (good to place in opera's folder itself), and copy all the URLs from the host file from here and Paste that text it into the urlfilter.ini file on your SD card. It's usually easiest to do this from your computer, after plugging in your device and enabling USB mode.

Now, disconnect your phone and open up Opera. Type opera:config in the URL bar and search for "URL Filter". You should see an option to tell Opera where your URL filter file is. Tap it and select where you placed the ini file on SD card. Then restart Opera and now your opera Mobile is Ad-free

There are also ad-block plugins for browsers like Dolphin Browser. Just google for this

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There is also an option available for blocking ads on every apps. This can be done by editing the APK file or hack the file so that it cannot sent any requests to Advertising networks. This is for Advanced users (programmers) only. Anyway, I will modify the famous applications like Talking Tom, Angry Birds etc. to get rid of the ads and post it in this blog. Stay tuned with us by Subscribing to our Feedburner to get those apps and all updates of this blog Mailed to your Inbox.

Please comment here if you had any problems.