Despite efforts from Google to put an end to unwanted advertisements being pushed to your device and clogging up your Android notification feed, companies like HTC and Sony have managed to get around this through some loopholes in the Google Play Store policies. It’s incredibly annoying to have your smartphone being plagued by spam from the maker of the device itself, and now even Samsung has started doing this. All of the ads are for Samsung products and I’m sure the struggling company needs to make money wherever it can, but that doesn’t make it OK to spam users.
We thought we were well passed the days of ads popping up in our notification shades, but how wrong we were. Made popular by an ad agency called AirPush, we were very clear from the get-go about our disdain for such an awful practice. Of course, Google would eventually put an end to this with some amendments to their Google Play Store policies and we were back to our happy, ad-free notification shades. Fast forward a few weeks ago where notification ads are apparently seeing some sort of resurgence. Not from some sketchy 3rd party app gone awry, mind you — that’s still against current policies — but from Android manufacturers themselves. It’s still a sort of grey area, one that both HTC and Sony were recently discovered partaking in. Their push notifications were cleverly advertising movie tie-in with themes from their respective Theme stores. Remember, apps are allowed to show notification “ads” as long as they’re an integral feature provided by the installed app (a game reminding you to play again, or an airline app that notifies you of special deals or promotions) or in this case — a new theme based that just so happens to be based on a brand new movie.
