What is the best DNS for Android?

- DNS is the Internet's Phone Book!

This is the question I get most from all the Android users across the globe. The name says it all that Android is a Linux based operating system and if you are already familiar with Linux, then it should be easy for you to get hold of a DNS server. Well, that's not completely true but we can say Android users have only two options to get a free DNS server for themselves. It's either of these options:

Wifi settings (Settings > Wifi & Networks > WiFi details) - There you can choose OpenDNS and you will have to enable it manually. In case you already want to use OpenDNS, just let the server know and they will add your sub-domain automatically.

OpenDNS servers on Play Store - You could subscribe to these servers as per your wish. OpenDNS is one of the best known third-party DNS (Domain Name System) provider which has its official Android and iOS applications as well. It offers an array of different features and provides a free user based DNS service. On their official website, you will find OpenDNS Android apps, OpenDNS Free, OpenDNS iOS app, and OpenDNS for the Mac. All you need is a username and password that you create during installation of the application.

OpenDNS DNS is currently available in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Japan and more than 50 million Android and iOS users worldwide. We have been using OpenDNS for a long time and for now, we will focus our efforts to help you get the best OpenDNS for your Android device. Let's see the top 10 OpenDNS for Android devices:

No. 1- 1Mpx1 It is the best OpenDNS client on Google Play store and it is our recommended app on this list. It has all the features available in other OpenDNS clients. This Android OpenDNS app is clean and straightforward and it has some cool new features such as:

It supports multiple user accounts. You can even access multiple users accounts from one device. You get OpenDNS for the cloud too. It gives a great experience without ads, banners or unnecessary features. It is completely free to use. You get everything for absolutely no charge.

How do I run a DNS server on Android?

I'm running a simple DNS server on my Android device.

I've got the device running CyanogenMod 11 and I installed Unbound (a really easy-to-use free DNS server that runs on Linux/Mac/Windows/iOS) and now I can reach my devices from external nameservers, but I need to setup my own nameserver so I can provide the proper data about my network for Google Play Services to find my devices.

My first question is, what do I need to put into /etc/resolv.conf? Does this file contain only the entries in /etc/resolv.conf are set automatically by dnsmasq (on Android there's no resolvconf package)? If so, where do I get that info? If not, how do I add my own entries to that file?

My second question is, how can I make Google Play Services use my own nameserver to resolve device IP addresses, and then use the official Android DNS server to resolve any of the rest of the data? I'm using my smartphone as an access point (I turned the WiFi off and then set up DD-WRT on it), so it's already connected to my home network. When I open Chrome or Firefox, they always use Google's DNS server for everything (eg if the user types in www.mydomain.com into the address bar, it will connect to Google's DNS server to resolve that). But I need it to work a bit differently. For example, I've disabled WPA and set up a DHCP server so that devices are assigned an IP address based on MAC address, as well as giving the right DNS servers. Google's DNS server responds by telling me that it's "not found." Google's DNS server is set to 127.0.1 and I need it to respond by using an internal DNS server.

And thirdly, which packages do I need to install? Should I use dnsmasq and unbound? The documentation for unbound says I have to include something called "unbound" in my deb file, but the "unbound" package doesn't exist for my distribution (I'm using CM 11). Am I better off just installing "unbound" with apt-get?

Should you turn on DNS in Android?

After getting the DNS resolution for both Google and OpenDNS set up on your Android device, I decided to compare how my DNS lookup times differed depending on whether I was using Google DNS or OpenDNS.

Here's a graph showing how they have changed over time. The graph below is based on my own tests, but it's consistent with the results of other people who have also tested the same.

Here's what we see in this graph: I'm glad to see that I get similar ping times using either Google's or OpenDNS's DNS resolver. Both appear to be pretty reliable. They are also fairly fast. This is really great news. And, of course, it seems likely that their speed is related to how they are coded.

What about the rest of the DNS resolutions? It's also interesting to see how long it takes to resolve other DNS servers. For example, here are the DNS ping times for the DNS servers for the main US sites. The data for these graphs is also from a sample of my own. In this case, the top three sites are the same as before, but the bottom three have all been added.

These results were interesting. The top 3 sites, which included Google, OpenDNS, and my ISP (AT&T), had very consistent and speedy DNS resolutions. But, when I checked DNS resolutions for sites that aren't generally considered to be mainstream (such as reddit), my results were much slower.

This highlights an important aspect of the results for the majority of people who are using DNS resolvers. Name resolution performance for the typical sites is really good. But, this isn't true for the sites and services that people aren't used to having fast name resolution for. For example, in my case, it takes a lot longer to resolve the Reddit site than it does to resolve Google. It's not a huge difference, but it's worth being aware of.

I also thought it would be interesting to show how the DNS server performance scales. The more DNS servers you use, the longer it takes to resolve the DNS server you need to use. For example, resolving nslookup.org takes about 9ms. If you want to resolve other sites such as digg.