Every quarter, Samsung is consistently one of the top global smartphone vendors by market share. In addition to its flagship Galaxy S phones, the company has gone all-in on its Galaxy Z line of foldable devices. Samsung also floods the market with its affordable Galaxy A handsets year after year. Needless to say, the South Korean conglomerate is one of the most important players in the market. This makes it even more unforgivable that Samsung packs all of its stock mobile apps with ads. Thankfully, this annoying problem should be solved before the end of 2021.
Samsung knows we hate the ads in its apps
In a recent town hall meeting, Samsung mobile boss TM Roh answered a question from an employee about the ads. He revealed that Samsung would be removing the ads from at least some of the stock apps. The company has since publicly confirmed these plans to multiple publications.
“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 to The Verge.
“The update will be ready by later this year,” the company added, without providing the specific date. “Our priority is to deliver innovative mobile experiences for our consumers based on their needs and wants. We value feedback from our users and continue our commitment to provide them with the best possible experience from our Galaxy products and services.”
Samsung is not the only vendor guilty of pushing ads through push notifications and its own default apps. That said, Samsung might be the most egregious, as there isn’t much difference between an ad in a Samsung app and the spammy ads you might have found on a sketchy website. Whatever money Samsung was making from these ads must not have outweighed the public outcry. No one wants to pay over $1,000 for a phone flooded with third-party advertisements.
If you haven’t seen the ads before, it’s worth checking out the examples that 9to5Google shared. Samsung’s One UI is a relatively smooth, attractive interface for Android devices. These ads did a stellar job of cheapening the user experience. 9to5Google also points out that the three apps mentioned in the statement aren’t the only apps with ads. Samsung Health, unbelievably, also surfaces ads. It’s unclear if every Samsung app will be ad-free later this year. There also didn’t seem to be any mention of the push notifications that also plague Samsung phones. We’ll find out when Samsung pushes out these One UI updates later this year.
