AdGuard nears release of AdGuard Mini for Android as early beta bugs get squashed

After weeks of testing, AdGuard is preparing to roll out the stable version of AdGuard Mini for Android, having wrapped up most of its early beta bug fixes. In a new Reddit post on r/Adguard, a company social media manager shared that the team is “on the home stretch, polishing every detail” ahead of the official launch.

According to the update, early testers helped the developers track down and fix “a solid batch of bugs and minor issues” that popped up after the first test build went live.

If the name AdGuard Mini sounds unfamiliar, that is because it is actually a massive overhaul of the old AdGuard Content Blocker on the Google Play Store. That app has over 10 million downloads, but it only worked inside Samsung Internet and Yandex Browser, leaving regular Chrome users out in the cold.

We took the beta build for a quick spin, and you can still see why that old limitation exists if you tap the bottom strip to set up browser blocking after the initial setup.

If you don’t have Samsung or Yandex installed, a screen pops up explaining that Google Play only allows direct browser ad blocking in those two apps, while tapping the option to protect another browser just kicks you back to the Play Store to browse other AdGuard apps.

Fortunately, the new first-time setup bypasses that browser headache completely.

We recently covered how AdGuard’s CTO pushed back on Chrome ad blocker doom on desktop, and the company is using a neat workaround on phones too. Right after the welcome screen, the onboarding flow walks you through turning on free DNS protection to shield all your browsers and apps through a local VPN.

You aren’t locked into AdGuard’s own servers either, as you can scroll down and pick popular options like Google DNS, Cloudflare, OpenDNS, or Quad9.

As detailed in the AdGuard v3.0 beta blog post, the update also adds a built-in video player for watching YouTube without ads. You just share a video from the YouTube app into AdGuard Mini, which is a nice perk while Chrome 150 and 151 strip away final workarounds for older blockers.

All of those core features and a new activity stats screen stay free, though the app does pitch a paid full version if you want deeper web tracker blocking and custom filter controls.

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