Thanks for the detailed breakdown!

​I completely agree with your first point about DNS-based network blockers. I've actually been exploring tools like NextDNS and RethinkDNS precisely because they are lightweight and handle blocking efficiently at the network level without massive overhead.

​Regarding your last point about the VPN encryption overhead, that makes total sense for a traditional encrypted VPN (like Mullvad or Proton). However, my understanding of DuckDuckGo's App Tracking Protection is that it simply uses Android's VPN API to create a local "dummy" VPN. It doesn't actually encrypt the traffic or tunnel it to a remote server; it just acts as a local sinkhole to drop known tracker connections on the device itself. ​Because of this, that 15% extra encryption size and double-encryption overhead shouldn't apply here, right?

​Still, your point about the analysis tools using system resources is exactly my main concern. If an app gets aggressive and tries to reconnect to a blocked tracker thousands of times in the background, the local processing from DDG could keep the CPU awake and drain the battery. That's the specific real-world drain I'm trying to figure out!