Adguard iOS Updates & Release Notes

July 17, 2025

Filtering is meant to stay in the background. When it works well, you don’t notice it — just a clean, ad-free web.

In this update, we’ve significantly improved how filtering works under the hood. We’ve upgraded the content blocking rules converter, the WebExtension engine, and the JavaScript filtering library. These changes bring:

Better compatibility with AdGuard filtering rules

Faster and more stable application of filtering rules

Improved support for the latest filters

Optimized performance of the Advanced Blocking extension

What does this mean in practice? Ads are blocked more precisely — including on tricky websites like YouTube. If you use Safari to watch videos, you should now see fewer issues like delays or black screens caused by blocked ads.

We’ve also updated the video guide on how to enable AdGuard extensions in Safari. These extensions are key to applying advanced filtering and getting the best ad blocking experience, especially on platforms like YouTube. So it’s important you have them on.

On that note, we’ve fixed an issue with YouTube live streams in AdGuard’s built-in video browser. After some changes on YouTube’s end, streams stopped working. That’s now resolved — live streams are back, and still ad-free.

And finally, as always, we’ve fixed other minor bugs and made performance improvements throughout the app.

December 30, 2024

This update is just a chill guy that makes the app up to 30x faster. We did some work on Safari Converter, so now AdGuard filtering rules are converted to Safari rules in just 0.5–2 seconds instead of 10–30. You will notice the difference especially when updating, enabling, or disabling filters and turning protection on.

Let's give a bit of explanation.

Updating and/or applying filters involves three steps: downloading new versions to the AdGuard app (a seamless process), converting AdGuard rules into Safari-compatible rules (now 30x faster thanks to optimization), and loading the rules into Safari. In the case of the last step, however, on iOS and iPadOS, the process takes 6–15 seconds per small content blocker to compile rules compared to fractions of a second on macOS. This delay affects user experience and slows filter updates, which are critical for ad blockers' performance. AdGuard has reported the issue to Apple (ticket ID: FB16130983) and hopes for a fix in 2025. You can read the blog post for more details.

July 3, 2024

Apple fixed its iOS 17 bug that was limiting the number of Safari content-blocking rules, which contradicted their own Safari Content Blocking API documentation. That lets us remove our temporary workaround for that problem. In short, that means you can finally enable a large number of filters without them crashing, thanks to the fact that all of the 900K rules (provided by 6 AdGuard content blockers) are available again, as they are supposed to. Also, we updated Scriptlets — one of the essential libraries needed for the app’s stable performance.

If you are using iOS 17, please note that for this fix to work you need to update to the latest iOS. If you are using iOS 16 and below, this bug doesn’t affect you.