Today, HTC has taken the “native advertising” a step further and begun sending push notifications straight to user’s devices. The push advertisement is for a custom theme available in HTC’s theme store. Sponsored themes like these are nothing new (Samsung offers Marvel based themes on the S6), but pushing them to users’ notification panels without their consent is more aggressive than we’re used to and it’s reminiscent of a practice which Google itself fought against.
Google has managed to keep Android completely separate from its advertising business; i.e., there are no Google ads in Android, even though the temptation to do so and the ease and efficiency with which this can be done is tremendous. Luckily for us users, unless you willingly and actively install ad-supported applications, you won’t be bothered with ads.
Unless you’re an HTC user. HTC has been trying to inject ads into several parts of its Android customisations, and now it’s also started pushing ads to the notification drawer. This leaves an incredibly bad taste in my mouth, and it’s made it very sure I’m not going to buy an HTC device any time soon.
Failing on the Hardware front and now doing the same on the software. Looks like HTC is loosing focus.
Bad business to it’s greatness…i smell the former nokia CEO around
HTC with only Win10 in a few years after the liquidation. It worked before why not wipe and repeat the task?
ctrl-alt-del anyone?
wat
If they get 8 Billion in cash out of it they will gladly take it
i can see two scenarios following this:
1. HTC users are extremely annoyed, drop their devices, the company fails to the ground and never recover;
2. greedy phone manufacturers see dollar signs before their eyes, all competitors follow suit, there’s no escape.
With my extremely high faith in humanity I would say that both would happen.
HTC is already plunging toward the ground, and this would probably not help in whatever manner.
And the executives responsible for those stupid decision rarely seem to use their own product.
No escape? Get a BlackBerry. No privacy problems, no data mining problems, no security problems, no ads problems.
A better life my friend.
Hah, for how long? Considering rumor is that bb are either going to switch to Android or else flop in a most spectacular way. Bb is not a safe bet.
BlackBerry 10 is not going to go anywhere. Right now you can buy a phone with an operating system trusted by dozens of governments worldwide.
If you knew how government procurement (and big enterprise too) works, I’m not sure you’d give the “trusted by dozens of governments worldwide” argument much weight. At least not in the positive direction.
Funny you say that. I installed the Blackberry Messenger app on my phone when it became available for Android. I have since left that app because of the heavy way it advertises the messaging stickers.It’s kind of like what I found when i installed Viber, they also love to let you about their stickers.
Now if you take apps like Telegram, they make more stickers available for you to use but do not keep letting you know through some flags about stickers.
Now I’m ware that this might not be happening in native app in Blackberry but it already makes me not trust that it can’t happen.
This could, if it happens, be the one thing that pushes me back to iPhone. This is one approach that, with Apple’s track record, we can say they’re unlikely to follow. That being said, I don’t think Google’s likely to make this move on Nexus devices either. They’ve been smart up until now, so let’s hope they continue to be so.
HTC, I’d like to invite you to go f yourself.
I surely hope there is some way for HTC users to turn this off. Actually, I would assume that this is never on by default but that does seem to be the case.
So…yep, your response is entirely appropiate and HTC is entirely of my list now.
A distinction without a difference. Android is designed to feed users into the Google ecosystem. Sure you could strip all Google services out of android and not have any ads, but the reality is 90% of users will be immersed in Android + Google ecosystem which comes with ads.