[Android Apps and Games] CaptShaft:
Hello there folks! If you are like many of us, you enjoy using Waze to get around but in the last several versions you may have taken a active dislike to distracting and potentially dangerous advertising popping up while you are on the road. These advertisements come in two forms, one of which is so-called "Points of Interest" [POI] balloons and the other is pop-up advertising when you are stopped at an intersection.

I'm very sorry, but I don't need to see distracting pop-ups in traffic for the local movie, as this is an excellent way to end up having an accident due to how modern human brains have been wired to stare constantly at electronic screens. Plus the POI's obstruct other navigation icons or notifications of traffic on the screen. (My body will thank me if I don't stop by Dunkin' Donuts or the local fried chicken restaurant.)

The overall solution is you will download an older version of Waze, and overwrite the preferences file with a modified file that cuts out the advertising. You will need root level access in order to do this.

Since we are not modifying the program itself, and since the program is given away for free (in exchange for all that sweet, sweet "big data"), this is not what would be classified as "warez".

Most advertising from Waze is served from advil.waze.com or some localized equivalent thereof, depending on your language. We replace callouts in the preferences file to advil.waze.com instead with http://127.0.0.1 which causes the android computer to connect to nothing. We also set the number of POI balloons on the screen to zero.

Instructions are as follows:

0.	If you have Waze already installed, your first step is to roll over to /data/data/com.waze/ and delete the entire folder. Then uninstall your existing copy of Waze.

1.	Next download and install the attached version of Waze 3.9.6.0.

com.waze_3.9.6.0.zip 34.8 MB

https://mega.nz/#!VRcFmBSA!Ztlwd8tuQm_KNickcnlrr3kZ47edtmfnUEuWWbMMyTk

(No, it is not the most current version but this is what we do to block ads, and it works well enough.)

2.	Open this version of Waze on your android device just to get it going. Close out after you get to the navigation screen.

3.	Save the attached preferences zip onto your local disk, then decompress it there.

4.	Take this preferences file, copy it onto your android device.

5.	Navigate over to /data/data/com.waze/ and overwrite the preferences file you find there with our modified one.

6.	Enjoy a pleasant, relaxing, ad-free drive.

This works excellently for older RK3188 CPU android head units.

(Alternately, if you discover this modified preferences file causes problems on your phone or hardware, you should uninstall, reinstall, and manually replace any preferences callout to "advil.waze.com" with http://127.0.0.1 then set any references in that file about "POI" to zero.)

As a general note, any rooted android device you have should have ad blocking enabled, which can be done by installing AdAway through FDroid. https://f-droid.org/ downside is most of these advertising filters are not quite well tuned to block advertisements in Waze.

So we get around this by adding advil.waze.com to the blacklist option in AdAway.

Works well even in later versions of Waze, even if you can't block out POI balloons with this approach.

Happy Motoring!

Any thoughts or questions?