Adguard causing Play Services to be offline?

thrik

Hi all, I tried installing Adguard DNS for adblocking yesterday, but now my Play Services won't connect even when the tunnel is off. I can't go on the Play Store or log into Google for a few games I play. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas.

I see I can uninstall both and reinstall them through the GrapheneOS Apps program, but I thought it was a bad idea and would cause errors.

The Play Store app version is 39.1.26.-29.
The Play Services app version is 23.49.55.

other8026

thrik The only thing I can think of that would cause this would affect connectivity for the whole profile.

Did you turn off this setting: Settings > Network & internet > VPN > *the cog next to adguard* > Block connections without VPN?

thrik

other8026

Well really, I just messed up. I didn't realize Adguard would default to using a VPN through their app. I have read that VPN is not secure through the GrapheneOS wiki.

I regularly use this ad-infested app, so I wanted to use ad-blocking for it 🙂 but they have ad-blocking detection, preventing it from working right. The Adguard VPN worked where NextDNS didn't, but I didn't realize that was because it was a VPN vs DNS.

So at the moment, I'm trying to figure out a DNS-only solution, but this is probably no longer on topic for this forum.

I appreciate your help! It was likely that option, but I already uninstalled Adguard.

GrapheneOS

Apps implementing a VPN service can provide an entirely local implementation and use the VPN service feature to route DNS requests through themselves along with optionally also routing all other traffic through themselves. It sounds like you were using it in a mode which does not route other traffic through itself, so blocking connections not going through it won't work since it's not actually routing all the traffic in the normal mode. They support routing traffic through it and intercepting TLS connections by adding a locally generated root certificate which we strongly recommend against since it downgrades TLS security.

Consider using an implementation like RethinkDNS instead.