As Promised, Samsung Starts Removing Ads From Its One UI Android Apps

Samsung, no ads

Samsung has been among the most popular smartphone brand. And it plans to keep things that way.

Samsung the South Korean company has lots in resources, allowing it to develop and also release phones at a faster rate than most other vendors. This pampers customers. However, the experience of using its phones may not be the best out there.

One of reasons, is its inclusion of ads.

Samsung has been known to populate its phones with ads, like for example, to promote Samsung Pay, Weather, Theme and the Health app.

For obvious reasons, those Samsung-made apps are installed on Samsung phones. And Samsung has the rights to do whatever it pleases.

However, people don't like that.

Those customers who paid to buy their expensive Samsung phones, hate it when Samsung keeps on pestering with ads.

And finally, Samsung listens.

Just like it promised earlier this 2021, Samsung is starting to remove ads from its first-party mobile apps. What this means, no more ads or banners to promote Samsung apps on Samsung phones.

Starting October 1, the ads on a number of its apps suddenly stopped showing.

The only exception to this rule is Samsung Pay, where Samsung is still allowing itself to notify users of special offers. Samsung still shows a “Featured” section within the app that may include offers, but these are not blatant ads as were shown before.

The reports of the change initially started on Samsung’s Community Forum in South Korea, before receiving news coverage.

A Samsung employee confirmed that the news are correct.

The change was made through a server-side update.

Samsung’s Community Forum in South Korea
A user from Samsung’s Community Forum in South Korea shared a screenshot of the Samsung Pay app. Before the change, there were about two Samsung Pay banners in this page. (Source: Samsung Community Forum)

Unlike Apple which controls everything iPhones have, including its supply chain, as well as its hardware and software, Android is more open and flexible.

Google requires smartphone vendor to include a number of Google apps on phones that wish to use Android. The rest however, is mostly up to the vendors themselves.

In this case, Samsung installs a bunch of its own apps. It also installs its own One UI skin that is meant to improve experience and differentiate its phones from others in the competition.

With One UI, Samsung can create the same experience across its entire lineup, allowing budget Samsung phones to have a very similar experience with flagship Samsung phones.

But as a company that sells devices priced well into the the thousand U.S. dollar mark, users aren't expecting a bombardment of ads.

Making things worse, Samsung even asked users to opt-in to location tracking in order to improve in-app advertisements.

A lot of Samsung phone owners have been complaining about this, and they were far from the only ones.

Samsung started its plan to ditch ads back in August, largely thanks to complaints from employees who ere also unhappy because their software were getting populated with spam.

With ads on Samsung-made apps disappearing, this is a significant shift for Samsung.

Published: 
02/10/2021