HOW TO DISABLE GOOGLE ADS IN ANDROID APPS
Follow the steps to get an Ad-Free android app without paying extra for it. You can be the one who find ads irritating or someone who cares about the battery drain due to Ads(http://www.clic.cs.columbia.edu/~nieh/teaching/e6998/papers/eprof_eurosys2012.pdf).
Steps to reproduce:
- Get Apk file from mobile to laptop.
- Use Apktool to decompile the app(http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2213985).
- In decompiled app, go to folder /res/values. Open files strings.xml and public.xml.
- Corrupt the strings with google ad ids(eg. display_activity_ad_unit_id). Changing any one number in the id would work. This way google admob will not be able to authenticate and communicate with the app.Every app developer has to put a unique id in strings.xml or public.xml file for communicating with google admob. Changing this id disables the ad.
- Recompile the app, sign it and reinstall it in mobile.
- App works as usual with no ads.
Example(GeeksForGeeks Android App version 7.8.20):
- adb shell pm list packages -> adb shell pm path free.programming.programming -> adb pull /data/app/free.programming.programming-1.apk
- apktool if free.programming.programming-1.apk -> apktool d free.programming.programming-1.apk
- Open strings.xml file in free.programming.programming-1/res/values/ folder.
- Corrupt these 3 ids a) category_fragment_ad_unit_id, b) display_activity_ad_unit_id, c) disqus_activity_ad_unit_id For eg. change the last number to random number in 1-9 for each of the ids.
- apktool b free.programming.programming-1 -> java -jar signapk.jar certificate.pem key.pk8 D:project3SignApkfree.programming.programming-1.apk D:project3SignApksignedapksfree.programming.programming-1.apk -> adb install free.programming.programming-1.apk
- App works as usual with no ads.
- Other examples : Merriam Dictionary, Dictionary.com
Limitations :
- Many of the famous apps show ads from multiple ad sources. So, even if this method disables ads from Google, the app might still show you ads from a different source e.g. InMobi.
- Some app developers write the unique admob IDs' in java files which become incomprehensible smali files on decompiling.
