Quote:The company has been cut off from major mobile ad platforms, including Facebook. The company’s apps were removed from Google’s store in February as part of a purge of apps identified as malicious by Google, Android’s parent company, company executives said on a Tuesday earnings call.
Google said its reason for removing Cheetah Mobile apps, along with hundreds of apps from other developers, was that they displayed “disruptive ads” some of which were full-screen ads that covered the interface of their host apps.
Per Bjorke, Google’s senior product manager for ad traffic quality, told BuzzFeed News in a February interview that the apps removed were “mainly from developers based in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and India.”
Gabi Cirlig, a researcher at cybersecurity company White Ops, told Forbes earlier this month that four apps made by Cheetah Mobile, including Clean Master and Security Master, had been “collecting all manner of private user data, including users’ browsing history, search engine queries, and Wi-Fi access point names” and sending them to a web server based in China.
- https://technode.com/2020/03/26/whats-to...-downfall/
Cheetah Mobile's response:
But you're lying!
Sounds like utter garbage to me.
As for AdAway, it has source code available so you can audit that yourself if you want, but it's decent. You can
check it out for yourself. But it does, as mentioned in the OP, require to have a rooted device and have Super User installed. Both are fairly easy with little knowledge of Android and its underlying systems but you risk a) voiding the warranty in some cases and b) damaging the device and having to re-flash, thus losing all data (always make an encrypted backup if you modify the firmware or flash TWRP). Mistakes can be made that easily brick your device.
In my opinion, the simplest way to prevent ads is to alter your hosts file, and setup something like this, but it's less than trivial. You can also use a VPN that automatically routes connections through DNS or even just use the DNS yourself, without the VPN installation. Things like AdGuard on Windows would be a great example of DNS based ad prevention.
Edit: In the future, if you're going to recommend critical changes to a person's hardware or firmware, at least advise them of the risk.