Have you ever been faced with annoying ads while using apps on your Android phone? This post contains how to block ads on Android Using AdAway.

Advertising on android can be very annoying, i understand the fact that you could visit as many apps stores as possible. One major problem with installation of apps remains “ads” adverts.

It display annoyingly either the top or bottom of the application, some of them even pops up immediately you click a command or so.

There is a solution and the solution to that issue is ADAWAY.

AdAway is an open source ad blocker for Android using the hosts file. It needs Android ≥ 2.1 and ROOT access.

Features

AdAway is Open Source and Free Software (GPLv3+)AdAway lets you select your own sources of hosts filesYou can add exceptions to your Whitelist if an app is not working when specific hosts are blockedYou can define extra hostnames in your own BlacklistYou can add your own (hostname, IP)-pairs in the Redirection List

Requirements

• Android version: 2.1ROOT required Read/Write access on system-Partition
• Problems can occur on some HTC devices when system-Partition is not writable!

“AdAway is not available on Google Play! It was removed by Google due to Violation of section 4.4 of the Developer Distribution Agreement.”

Please Download it here.

How To Block Ads On Android Using AdAway

Step 1

Simply open the app and you will be presented with a screen similar to the one shown above. Click on “Download files and apply ad blocking”.

Step 2

Wait for the download to finish. It would hardly take a minute.

Step 3

You should now get a message like the one shown above. Restart your phone once and enjoy an ad free experience on your android smartphone. Likewise if you wish to disable ad blocking simply use the button to do so.

Remove Apps With Adware, It is possible that even after using AdAway you still get some annoying pop up ads on your home screen or in the notification panel. In this case you can access the “Scan for Adware” feature in AdAway. You will find that in settings. It would tell you which apps are responsible for showing those ads. That way you can get rid of these adware apps.

It should be noted that the main source of income for some developers providing you with great quality apps is through mobile advertisements. So it would be better to donate those developers for an ad free app experience rather than using AdAway to block their incomes.

You can also add custom hosts to AdAway if you want specific ads to keep on showing instead of a few. This is very important to add some host files to your white list so that Adaway won’t block such host there by allowing some websites or some apps malfunction. I’ve been able to compile a list of host files that should be white listed.

Must read: How to identify and add host file to White list