Technical Informations: How to block ads on your android ZTE V9

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

How to block ads on your android ZTE V9

This is the easiest way to block ads on the ZTE V9 or any other android device.

We are going to make a hosts file to redirect ant ad servers to 127.0.0.1 a.k.a localhost.

Why

Free
No app download
Saves on bandwidth - BIG TIME
Works on all apps on the device i.e. system wide
Safe and easy hack!

Prerequisite:

Root your device using z4root or similar
Install terminal app from the android marketplace
Download a hosts file WITH Unix character formatting to the sdcard

How to:

Open the terminal emulator
Type 'su' to get root access
Navigate to etc folder 'cd /etc'
rename hosts to hosts.old 'mv hosts hosts.old'
Navigate to the sd card 'cd /sdcard'
Copy hosts file dowloaded to /etc 'cat hosts > /etc/hosts'
Exit the terminal (you should not receive any errors)

Why cat?
"cat filename1 > filename2" - For some reason, the Droid does not come with a copy (cp) command. This works in the exact same way

Does it work...