Advertisements suck. Beyond being generally obnoxious, they can cause performance issues and even sometimes be downright malicious. There are plenty of ad-block solutions for your browser, but not as many to help with ads not hosted on websites, especially in apps on your phone. One of the most notable solutions to that problem is Pi-hole, a DNS-level ad-blocker that can run on something as simple as a Raspberry Pi. That's great for when you're at home, but the official solution for using Pi-hole on the go is a bit obnoxious.

Fortunately, there's always an alternative solution.

It's not a good or viable solution, but beggars can't be choosers, right?

For a few years, modern flagship phones have had comparable specs to mid-tier computers, which gave me a thought: why can't you just run a full-fledged virtual machine on your phone?

The short answer is “because virtual machines don't quite work like that”. The long answer is a bit too complicated for my small brain to properly explain, but the point is that running a virtual machine from your phone isn't really feasible for the average user.

Fortunately, there's another solution: emulation.