📺🌐 Universal ads mute & skip improved

1. Automate Community
2. Media & Video

This flow will mute all Android app ads as soon as possible, skip the ad, close ad displays, and restore normal UI.

Universal means:
* It works in most apps, including YouTube, YouTube Music, and Unity games.
* It works with Chinese, English, French, & German in ANY app that shows a "Skip ad" button.
* It works in ANY language, in ANY app that uses common ad display/skip UIs.
* For in-game ads, it doesn't mute unless an ad is playing, and although it does initiate ad closure, it doesn't fully close an ad that you activated for an in game reward.
* The ad skipping XPath data is taken from the GitHub repo when the flow is started, with a fallback to the last version stored with the app — so it'll automatically use updated ad detection criteria, like AdBlock.


Improved means:

* It unmutes if you switch apps mid ad.
* It doesn't change volume settings (i.e. actual mute, not volume 0).
* If you were already muted, it doesn't unmute.
* It skips multiple ads as soon as any are skippable.


Permissions note:

This flow does NOT access your storage.

That is possible in the HTTP request block (to upload a file or save a result), but it isn't used. It only gets the ad detection criteria JSON file from the repo, and stores it in memory.

It also doesn't upload any data at all.



GitHub repo: https://github.com/saizai/android_ads_skipper

Please submit pull requests to
a. improve ad detection criteria, and
b. XML dumps of examples from any app where it doesn't currently work fully — in three versions: no ad shown, ad playing but not skippable yet, and ad skippable.

Create XML dumps by clicking on the Interact block, clicking "inspect layout", going to the app, and triggering the capture.


Version log
2.2 (2023-06-23) switched to "Inspect changing layout" due to deprecation; added detection when media playing to auto close annoying UI (e.g. close YouTube controls when you press play)
2.1 (2022-09-05) added error catch if GitHub sync fails
2.0 (2021-06-07) first release of universal ad skipper