I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised. Marketers will always find a way to annoy users with ads in “inventive” ways. In this case, Japanese carrier KDDI has implemented push ads for certain Android handsets.
KDDI bundles an alternative app market called “au one Market” on some of their Android phones along with the official Google Android Market. Recently, they put out an update for the au one Market that enables pushing ads to those phones. So now instead of the notification tray containing (mostly) useful and relevant notifications, some KDDI users are greeted with ads for app deals in the au one Market. Ugh.
It seems that one or two revisions ago, the offending changes to the au one Market were introduced. The screenshot below indicates that with the update, the au one Market will stay resident even when not in use, and ads for app deals will be pushed to the phone.
The dialog box just has an okay button at the bottom, but there is a link hidden in plain sight right above the okay button to tap in order to decline the ads. These days, few users actually pay attention to the changelog text in these dialog boxes and hastily dismiss them by hitting okay. I assume that once you’ve agreed to the au one Market update, there isn’t a way to turn off the ads after the fact.
Adding insult to injury, users can’t easily remove the au one Market without some hackery. So unless public outcry causes KDDI to update the au one Market not to push these ads, it seems those users are stuck with these ads for the foreseeable future.
This isn’t a good precedent. Hopefully other carriers will know better than to implement such an annoying and intrusive “feature”.
Via Engadget Mobile, source: Asiajin
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