Samsung has confirmed that it will stop showing ads in default apps including Samsung Weather, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Theme. It follows comments made by its mobile chief TM Roh in an internal town hall meeting reported by Yonhap. “Samsung has made a decision to cease the advertisement on proprietary apps including Samsung Weather, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Theme,” the company said in a statement given to The Verge. “The update will be ready by later this year.”
I never got any of these ads on my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, but I’d be absolutely livid if I did. I’m not going to commend Samsung for doing the absolutely bare minimum here and not show ads on EUR1000 devices.
Dear lord.
Personally I’ve gone through the hassle of manually checking the installed apps list and uninstalling every single piece of crap that was possible to — and disabling those that were not. All the Samsung apps are useless crap and I never want to touch any of those.
I remember that my phone used to force me to install updates to Bixby when I simply tried to launch the camera app. I had remapped the Bixby button to open camera instead, but still it always was watching for Bixby updates at the same time. This behavior seems to have been fixed at some point since it has stopped altogether, so I never visit the useless Samsung store anymore.
The bottom is falling out of the digital (mobile, internet) advertising market. The ads i get on my iPhone are for either crap games (with plenty of ads in them themselves) or Apple TV shows, or other Apple promotions.
Web advertising is similar, It’s mostly just adverts for digital products like remote access stuff, VPN’s, or other websites. I really can’t imagine many people actually click on these things and walk out with a purchase, and i think marketing teams are waking up to this fact.
Agreed. Now if everyone would use adblock everywhere… sure the people who hosts sites would have to ask for donations, but I would rather donate to sites I visit than to give money to marketing jerks!
leech,
I also despise advertising and use adblocking as well. I’ve been using ad blockers for so long that I kind of take the experience for granted but every few years I see what the web has become without ad blocking and it’s just terrible. Still, also understand the financial dilemma because all of the other business models are struggling. IMHO if there has to be advertising I prefer 1st party advertising to 3rd party advertising. 3rd party trackers like google are exceptionally invasive to privacy.
Sites like CNN have both kinds of ads, the 3rd party ads (ie google ads) are blocked. Then there are first party ads hosted by CNN itself in their own sections under “CNN underscored” and “Paid partner content” on the home page (which aren’t blocked by my adblocker), at least these only have links from the home page and are not on every page.
On my phone, I’m able to block advertising networks using adaway. My wife’s phone is not rooted and she gets a ton of ads. I’m aware of alternatives like adguard that set up a fake VPN to block content, but this adds a lot of inefficiency and kills battery life. But then it works with unrooted phone.
Why not use firefox? It runs adblock extensions on mobile too without too much performance or battery drain. You lose the chrome tracking and spying features though.
kompak,
Well, I don’t run firefox on adroid anymore because mozilla has turned it into a walled garden blocking almost all 3rd party extensions (damn you mozilla for not letting me install the extensions I need). I don’t want to endorse this crappy behavior even from open source projects /gripe
The major difference is that adaway blocks ad and tracker networks across the entire phone. This means it’s not just web ads, adaway is able to block ads in many other applications too, which also helps save on useless bandwidth consumption. It’s funny because sometimes my wife’s phone has ads in applications I didn’t even know had ads because adaway blocked them on my phone.
@kompak
I’m careful about what I install on my phones. Because of the magic of open source I’m unable to run the latest version of Firefox on my Android 4.3 phone because Firefox now requires Android 5. It’s only used as a deskphone so I put Chrome on without uBlock Origin. It’s only there to mitigate clicking on a link accidentally. For my other phones which Firefox gracefully deigns to support I have Firexfox and uBlock Origin installed.
Yes my Android 4.3 phone is ancient but it works. The vast majority of threats are not in the OS but externally facing apps. If the app has a problem my phone whatever the level of OS version is toast anyway.
There is no valid reason for these arbitrary support cut off dates. My desktop phone is good for another 10+ years or even another 20+ as is or until 2G/3G is cut off.
Perhaps one of the big reasons why so many “businesses” are floundering and dependent on garbage web ads is because they’re not worthwhile businesses in the first place. Not every idea is a great one and not every business deserves to make it. I’d argue that the easy & vast majority are neither.
My entire household uses adblockers and I neither feel bad nor will ever apologize for it. I’m about as interest in ads as I am somebody knocking on my door wanting to talk to Jesus. For that record, that would be 0% interested.
friedchicken,
Professional journalism is really suffering no matter which way you cut it. Maybe journalists are just obsolete? I’d argue we need real journalism now as much as ever though.
I don’t want ads either, but at the same time nobody wants to pay. For better or worse people expect stuff for free. Darwian evolution has advertising as the dominant business model and others traditional models are dying.
@Alfman
I agree that society does need real journalism to make a come back but unfortunately I don’t see that happening. Not when people carry a phone around 24/7 constantly checking for breaking news, feed updates, new pic uploads and posts by former classmates pretending to be on vacation. Real journalism takes time to research & verify. It just doesn’t happen fast enough in a world where most people simply aren’t willing to wait and don’t have the attention span even if they wanted to.
You’re absolutely right, people expect everything for free these days. We’re all guilty of it to some degree. Part of me is put off by that attitude but another part of me feels like this is the type of culture greed and capitalism has created. Nobody was born pre-addicted to free stuff. I don’t and will never support any business out of pity over the give-me-everything-for-free culture.
People have been peddling their goods & services for thousands of years, long before the net was born. There are plenty of ways to reach potential customers/clients if you’re not scared to do the work. Low hanging fruit may be tempting but it comes at a price. People taking steps to block digital ads from being crammed down their throats every waking second was always where that behavior by businesses would end up. Nobody feels bad tossing unopened junk mail in the trash, why should digital junk be any different?
friedchicken,
One thing is different though: never in the history of mankind has any industry exhibited zero (or near-zero) marginal cost. This phenomenon is particularly strong with digital goods (software, OS, apps, news, etc) in companies with huge scales of economy (ie all our major tech companies). Compare this to an old fashioned trades like doctors, carpenters, shoe polishers, and markets always needed tradesman to exist in proportion to consumers. This helped create sustainable opportunities for workers and competition for consumers. Even old school “intellectual property” like book printing was labor intensive. However modern capitalism has increasingly favored tech giants who do not employ tradesmen proportional to the size of the customer-base. Instead massive consolidation has created logarithmic.hiring. This obviously hurts professionals in the affected industries, but it can also come at the expense of customers who loose competition and become insignificant to companies. Some companies don’t even bother providing customer support (looking at you google).
Arguably things have gotten more optimal and efficient in a capitalistic sense, but at the same time these redundancies are have put qualified workers out of a job and to add insult to injury the money that had been used to pay the ex-employee salaries does not go back to the market in a way that an ex-employee can meaningfully compete for it, it becomes padding on a billionaire’s bank account instead.
We’d better get used to it because I don’t think it’s going to stop. In theory governments could step in, but I have very little faith in the process. All indicators point to the monopolization by top companies is just going to become more acute with time. Welcome trillion-are overlords.
“Welcome trillion-are overlords.”
Thanks firefox for correcting trillionaire->trillion-are. I make plenty of spelling/typing mistakes, but sometimes firefox spell check just makes things worse and I don’t always catch it, haha.
Never underestimate the technological and financial illiteracy of most people. Most online ads I see in mobile games target one of the two.
Anyway, if the GDPR didn’t kill the digital advertising market, nothing will. Remember, Google doesn’t give a hoot if anyone actually walks out with a purchase and doesn’t even provide a mechanism for businesses to find out. They just charge per click, and this is where their entire business model hinges on: As long as they can convince businesses that their ads are “relevant” and are driving purchases, they can keep making money without having to prove they are providing anything of value. Hence all the chest-thumping about algorithms: Google’s entire revenue stream depends on them convincing businesses they know the desires of users from sparse data points. If the illusion is broken, it’s over for Google.
I’m not sure people realise how different the print and broadcast and online digital experience is not to mention the social and other changes between the and now. There’s also the arbitary and invasive and junk riddled experience too which has too often become more of a default than an exception.
Advertising also comes in different forms. There’s background advertising, infomercials, and reviews or word of mouth, or even just the plain old phone book or equivalent, or just having a presence at social events like conferences or media appearances or anywhere where potential clients may congregate, or networking. Personally I hate advertising but I think something organic with consent and where there is genuine interest is legitimate. Advertising might not actually sell your product or business either but more your industry. It can help shape expectations too. It”s all for nothing if you provide a rubbish product and poor customer relationships or rip people off, or are just plain evil.
Adverts for women’s stuff is mostly beauty products or fast fashion via social media “influencers” on poseur sites like Instagramm. I really couldn’t care less what Beyonce or the Kardashians are up to and have better things to do than click away on Instagramm.
Maybe they can fix their broken BLE implementation whilst they are at it?
Is it non-broken when you use Samsung products? Trying to figure out if it’s a subtle hint that they don’t want you to use non-Samsung products.
I don’t know. It seems like the MTU can not be set above 23 in the direction of the phone, but can be set higher in the direction of the device. I guess this mitigates stuff like headphones or other output devices from being scuppered. But it reeeeealy breaks any application where you are trying to send any amount of data in a bidirectional fashion.
BTW, this is why Google keeps making Pixels, even if the division is probably loss-making. They need to provide a “reference point” so nonsense like this isn’t considered normal.
Microsoft should also provide a normal, run-of-the-mill laptop as the “reference point” for Windows, so people learn that AV trials and random junkware on a new laptop aren’t a normal thing.
The OpenGL ARB always provided a software reference implemetation. I also liked their open standards approach and open format for membership. I think one thing lacking with current application store models is they’re all polarised locked in greedy walled gardens. There’s nothing stopping software distribution from following an open standards model or having shared back end services with a facility for sideloading and independent vendors hosting their own products. Much like public roads I think this is infrastructure. It should not be viewed as a profit centre in its own right bcause this is what is driving the greed and horrendous user experience and fragmentation. Behind all the stupidity even politics works with a “design pattern” like this to a degree.
Literally none of this is relevant to what I said. My point is, Google can release all the “reference implementation” Android ROMs they want, and Microsoft can push out official Windows ISOs, but it doesn’t matter, the Samsungs and LGs will still try and do their own thing. This is why a “point of reference” device is needed, sold directly to users, so users can see how the OS experience is meant to be without the OEM crap.
This is why Google is still fighting on with the Pixel. If Samsung is acting like they do now, imagine if Google had no direct route to the users’ hands.
The OpenGL ARB is very relevant from a standards point of view. OpenGL standards included conformancy tests. If you didn’t adhere to the standard you couldn’t call it OpenGL. Extensions were the mechanism by which features could be launched ahead of a standard revision and IHV’s could be individualistic and many of those were folded into the revised standard. Unlike things like Direct 3D where the standard for many years was the implementated (much like you suggest with LG and Samsung et al) with OpenGL the standard was the standard and pretty thoroughly documented too.
This issue of standards relating to software distribution mechanisms is somewhat related to the discussion and very current.
Software developers and end users were fairly represented on the OpenGL ARB via vendors.
Like I said it’s a design pattern to provoke a little thinking…
I have no idea what this has to do with a reference platform. We are not talking about the software, we are talking about the hardware.
@henderson101
Pay attention.
Samsung’s devices are irritating. They change a lot in the UI and not for the better. Releasing products with screen shots in the user documentation then means you need to choose “show more than one version of the way a OS level dialog pops up, or pick one and have everything look different on another version of Android that is effectively the same OS version…”
@henderson101
I install Nova on all my Android devices. I don’t find much of a problem with Samsung stuff although the uremovable bloatware is an irritant but I have that problem with a Nexus phone too.