I wanted to share my current setup on iOS for adblocking youtube and the web. Unfortunately, this is not as easy on iOS as desktop.

There is one new-ish web browser on iOS called Orion which supports desktop extensions but is too buggy for actual use. So instead of uBlock origin, we have to use a Safari extension + DNS filtering or some browser which provides adblocking.

Safari

For Safari, the best setup I have found is Adguard Pro with all filters enabled and DNS set to Adguard DNS as a VPN (the app will prompt to add the VPN.)

This works well. I used Brave browser on iOS to complement my Brave desktop installation but decided it was too much of a memory hog. Brave’s blocking seemed slightly better than Adguard but this could be a filter list discrepancy or difference of implementation.

Other recommended Safari extensions are Noir to apply dark mode to all websites and Sink It for Reddit which allows for adblocking and old reddit style CSS to be applied after page load.

Youtube

This one is a little more complicated. For a long time we could VPN to Turkey and get premium for much much cheaper. This was patched unless you’re willing to make another AppleID for this purpose (I am not.)

The next best thing is sideloading. Altstore is the main tool for this, but I prefer a fork of it called Sidestore that allows for untethered sideloading provided you do not let certificates expire.

It is not hard to install but requires some work. The instructions are quite good and ironically it is easier to do on GNU/Linux than Windows.

For GNU/Linux, I chose to use the podman command instead of docker as podman was in my repositories and it does not have too many dependencies. So, sudo apt-get install podman or in my case, sudo pkcon install podman. In order for the application to detect my iPhone, I ran this variant of the podman command:

podman run --rm -it --device /dev/bus/usb --privileged -v ${PWD}/:/mnt/ -v /var/run/usbmuxd:/var/run/usbmuxd ghcr.io/sidestore/altcon

It will run, ask you to trust the computer on your device and then provide a command you copy/paste to install Sidestore. You need to change it to include your AppleID username and password. It works with 2FA and everything - just put in the 2FA code and it will install the pre-downloaded Sidestore IPA.

You have to enable developer mode on your iPhone which is in Privacy & Security as well as trust your own developer profile in General->VPN & Device Management.

It will also provide a pairing file. You should zip this and put it in your iCloud drive or similar so that it can be imported into Sidestore later. If you don’t zip it, it will change filetype and be unusable or something.

Then, download StosVPN on your iOS device which is a local tunnel thing and not an actual VPN. This is required for sidestore to do some macbook spoofing so that it can sign your apps. Open it, allow it to create the VPN, turn the VPN on, then open Sidestore. Sidestore will ask for your pairing file - you can unzip the pairing file in Files app and then select it in Sidestore. Sidestore will then refresh itself.

You need to sign into Sidestore with your AppleID as well. I trust Sidestore/Altstore but all of this is, of course, up to you.

Now you can add sources. For youtube I recommend iKarwan’s repo. All of the other modified Youtube IPAs are in some state of broken. There’s a $3 yearly license fee which is very fair for the value provided.

Install that, activate the license and you are good to go with ad-free youtube.

End…

Did we do all of this work to save $10 a month? Why yes, yes we did. Does it all seem too complicated? Stop complaining. This is what you get when we have a major tech company monopoly with few consumer protections and DRM all over the place. It’s only going to get worse.