I recently signed up for Mullvad and it’s been great on my PC, but I’m debating on if I want to use it on my phone or not. I have a OnePlus 6T running Rising OS on Android 13, and I’ve used TrackerControl for years to block trackers in apps. I know Mullvad has DNS tracker blocking, but not knowing exactly what it’s blocking is annoying. So, what do you prefer?
AFAIK, on my Android phone, I can use Mullvad + Mullvad DNS/NextDNS/etc… with the Private DNS feature built-in on Android.
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I use NextDNS for this. It’s like MullvadDNS if you had the choice of selecting different blocklists.
I recommend to start with this guide.
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For people like me (and I think you) there is sort of no perfect solution. Ideally we’d use a VPN with the VPNs default/built-in blocklists. But if you want granular control/awareness/analytics, there isn’t a VPN provider that I am aware of that gives you this level of control with their built in blocking. A potential middle ground is to set your VPN to passthrough DNS queries to a provider of your choice, but only a few VPN clients support this (I believe Mullvad is one of them). However that likely wouldn’t work with something like tracker control which is a locally installed app iirc(?), it could work with something like NextDNS.
The only thing I could recommend, that is not recommended by everyone else, is using [AdAway | adaway.org]. It is a DNS/hosts based content blocker that you can run either in VPN mode (similar to TrackerControl) or in root mode, which is amazing. Before every app I used was tracker/ad-free AdAway was really useful, it blocks ads, trackers, etc. And it even comes with a simple web server to confuse adblockers-blockers.
Quick warning to setting your built-in DNS. Make sure that your DNS requests are exiting through your VPN, otherwise you will have DNS leaks. (Meaning your local DNS servers will be used, causing you to leak your general location and that you are using a VPN.) I believe this is automatically done if you do DoH, however, make sure that is the case. Also, having a custom DNS apart from your VPN also allows your traffic to be more easily identified and de-anonymized from other traffic, which could be problematic. If you can, I would recommend using a local level solution but I’m unaware of anything with Android support that would do this and still allow VPN connections.
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