4.0.1 Pro

It's been forever since the last AdGuard Pro update, and even more since the last meaningful one. We hope very much that this huge update will redeem us. And there's no reason to think otherwise: the number and the scale of changes is enormous. Starting with a complete UI rework, followed by the introduction of Content blockers and other meaningful additions and enhancements like Activity feed and improved DNS filtering.

Major design changes

Traditionally, a major version increase heralds a lot of changes regarding the UI. This time is not an exception. And considering the app jumped from v2.1 straight to v4.0, the transformation is drastic. Here's an attempt to list everything that has changed in terms of UI:

• General design changes. Seriously, this is almost a new app now. New style, menu logic, icons... One thing stays the same though: you can switch to dark mode.

• Advanced mode: additional settings for advanced users. Use at your own risk! However, the app isn't called 'AdGuard Pro' for nothing: if you've been using it for a while, these advanced settings probably won't scare you off.

• Activity feed: DNS requests log, exhaustive request details. This is more or less the familiar requests log, but better looking and more detailed.

• Most active companies: not only you now can see which company this or that DNS request belongs to, you can view the "leaderboard" on the 'Most active companies' screen, accessible from the activity feed.

• Requests statistic. Switch between all-time, monthly, weekly or daily stats.

Content blocking

This update features a solid amount of changes that are aimed at enhancing the Safari content blocking. Its efficiency has increased manyfold compared to v2.1.

[Enhancement] Safari content blocker max rule count raised to 300k #819

Safari is notoriously known for its harsh 50k max limit for filtering rules in content blockers. This number is laughably low, and for ages we were struggling with it. Now we've implemented a workaround: split AdGuard Pro into six content blockers. Each of them has the same 50k restriction but in total they add up to a reasonable 300k rules max. You don't have to seek weird compromises anymore and can enable all your favorite filters at once!

[Enhancement] "Content blockers" screen #1105

It would surely be irritating to have to go to Safari settings to check which content blockers are enabled and which are not. We know this from personal experience. The logical solution was to add a new screen right to AdGuard Pro settings, which we did. Go to General settings > Content blockers to see the current state. You’ll even find there which filters exactly are enabled and how many rules each of the content blockers has used up.

[Enhancement] Content blocker affinity #1104

Some filtering rules depend on each other or work better together. There’s a problem in cases when such rules belong to different content blockers. Normally they wouldn't always work as intended, even if both content blockers were enabled. But we put in extra work to achieve cross-content blocker compatibility, so the quality of ad blocking went further up.

[Enhancement] An option to import custom filters by URL #518

This option will be very useful for those who support their own filters, or just have a favorite filter that wasn't included by default. Add it by URL and it will be kept updated just as any other filter!

DNS protection

It was already on a solid level before the update, so we didn't change too much compared to content blocking or UI. It doesn't mean we didn't do anything, though!

Enhanced DNS protection #1107

This includes a few measures. Firstly, we made it so it's possible now to enable and disable DNS protection for Wi-Fi or mobile data separately, a feature that should be helpful to many AdGuard Pro users.

Besides that, in addition to familiar DNS functionality you now can add mobile network or certain Wi-Fi networks to exclusions. For example, you can use it if you have AdGuard Home set up for your home Wi-Fi.

There are several lesser changes related to DNS functionality that are too technical or too minor to include here, but together they make the DNS protection suite quite a lot better compared to the previous version.