If they are "shady" they are in for a very long game. AdGuard has been around for over 20 years and I haven't seen any trustworthy reports they are anything else than what they say they are.

I prefer NextDNS for blocking ads and trackers, you get to choose your own blocklists and white/blacklist domains of your choosing if you run into some problems.

Adguard is good, very good. Their rules are default included on uBO, they know their jobs well so getting very good product. As an alternative you can consider NextDNS

I have no idea if adGuard is trustworthy or not, I personally use adAway which is open source and under a GPLv3 license. Perfectly satisfied with it.

I JUST suggested AdGuard to two non-techie normie friends, so y'all better not make me take it back! ;-) That said, I've been using it on my Pi-4 at home and on my Android phone for more than a year now.

No opinion on AdGuard, but there are several options for ad blocking DoH:

• https://ahadns.com/
• https://blahdns.com/
• https://controld.com/free-dns
• https://libredns.gr/
• https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/
• https://rethinkdns.com/

As an ad blocker/tracker blocker, AdGuard works really well.

They also have a “browsing security filter” which may be of concern to some people. This filter, similar to smart screen and Google Safe Browsing, will check to make sure websites aren't in a list.

However, if you have it on, they have a section you can opt in (I think it is opt in) to send extra data to help with the security filter.

That telemetry may seem like too much for some people, but I think it's the only thing in AdGuard products that collects data, and even then, it's not for making the filter better and helping its development, not for selling data.

edit two weeks later: Fixed what I meant to say, thankfully people knew what I meant and upvoted.

I had been using them for ages, but they don't really filter out that much, so it's a tad pointless.

Recently I've switched to Rethink DNS where you can select the blocklists you want. And that's... Super effective.

I've been using it for a while now, no complaints.

There's zero evidence of any wrongdoing or shadiness other than them having employees living in Russia. The company itself moved to Cyprus, many of their engineers left Russia, none of their servers are physically located in Russia, and they publicly disavowed Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

This doesn't mean Russia couldn't apply massive pressure by threatening family members, etc, of course, but I personally have no concerns at this time and use AdGuard Home (their local adblocking DNS server) in my LAN and their iOS app on my devices. The iOS app in particular uses Apple's content-blocking Safari tech so it should be completely safe so long as you don't pay for a VPN or use a local VPN to block everything outside Safari.

If you're rooted on Android, definitely use AdAway instead, it just replaces the hosts file.

https://adguard.com/en/blog/official-response-to-setapp.html

Quad9 ?

I have been a long term user of AG Home. My only complaint is some streaming services. We have YouTube TV and the audio gets out of sync sometimes....can confirm it was in fact AG but I guess it could be the older Pi I was running it on.