Yep I'll be honest never used one. I've had ad blocking on my android for probably a decade and it was a struggle for the average android user to have it up till a couple years ago. The walled garden of apple I assumed the ad blocking was just as hard and likely harder than doing it on android.

Maybe try Firefox instead. I'm on the lemmy sync app and it loads articles natively through it's own browser, but I guess it doesn't block ads because the site was complete shit, like you said. However when I opened the article in Firefox not a single ad loaded.

No issues for me using NextDNS. I’m a big fan. It blocks everything way upstream at the DNS level so I don’t need to worry about configuring my devices. It’s basically a lazy pihole. I used to run pihole but moved to a new place and couldn’t be bothered to set it up again. No regrets, one less thing to manage.

I’m using AdGuard on an iPhone and there are zero ads in the article. You should get a better ad blocker I’m sure there are good ones on Android too.