Is it safe to use free movies sites on a phone, specifically iOS devices?
As the title says, what are the risks, I assume people don’t host these servers for no reason. Is it just the ad revenue they get from the popups when trying to start the movie.
Could they be running exploits on here that would make it not safe at all to do so?
Using the default browser on an iOS device should be fairly safe, assuming that you accept all security updates as they become available. Outdated browsers, on the other hand, are a major security risk.
For legitimate free movie sites (Plex, etc.), ads are indeed the main source of income, along with paid services like the ability to rent current movies. If you are smart about it, they may not collect too much of your personal information.
For the rest, the business model relies on pop-up based scams, hijacking machines for botnets, and ransomware.
Browser updates on iOS devices are tied to system updates and people put off a system update longer that an app update. So no, not as safe as OTA updates independent of the OS, as they are on every other god damn operating system.
You can run adblockers and other privacy extensions in Safari. Unfortunately Firefox on iOS doesn’t support extensions, because it still uses Safari to display the pages (iOS is dumb that way).
If you use safari content blockers combined with a DNS blocker configuration to block ads and malware, you should be fine. A lot of those sites will break though, compared to viewing them on desktop FF with uBO.