is it doing its own ad blocking or is it doing ad blocking as a safari ad block extension? There is a very specific high-performant ad block mechanism in iOS now.
If it's anything like the ones I looked at a while back, it goes through a proxy to strip the ads. So all of your web browsing goes through a 3rd party. I'm no technical wiz on such things, but I can't think of how else it could work without being an Apple-approved Safari extension.
It could run a local proxy on the device itself, perhaps. I know iPhone apps can expose HTTP servers to other devices on WiFi for file sharing, so I wouldn't be surprised if you can expose it to localhost too.
Mm, good point, and given that I actually wrote a baby web server for serving up docs a long time ago, I'm disappointed that it didn't occur to me. In fact, I wonder why more don't do that. All of the ones I looked at (and it's hardly an all-encompassing list) seemed to do it through a proxy that the dev hosted.