I'll reproduce my comment [0] here from a similar article earlier this year [1].
Note: I ended up setting up that pi-hole, and I see it blocking a ton of DNS lookups for these types of companies across my family's devices.
> I think many people would be surprised by the amount of analytics data leaving their phone _all the time_. I recently was doing some work where I had my iPhone proxied through mitmproxy on my laptop, and was blown away by just how much data was being sent. Some apps were sending a request to one or more analytics firms every single time I touched a UI control. I would set up a pi-hole and VPN to block this stuff, but I'm sure the app developers will just start tunneling the requests through their own hosts. Maybe some day one of these open source phones will actually be viable.
Same here, I also started to work on a project to consolidate pi-hole into a single binary using Rust. I want to run it on my laptop and on my routers at home as well.
As for running an adblock on your router, if your router supports openwrt, openwrt has an adblock addon[2] that is easily configurable.
Unfortunately, you will lose out on the statistics that Pi-hole collects.
[1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
[2] https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/...