"there are no ads built in the OS and I never see any, period. It's just like on iOS, I don't know what on earth he's on about."
I was referring to Amazon's Kindle Fire, but the Android experience in general is filled with ads. Not only does a core app like Google Maps include sponsored links, Google pushes consumers and developers towards ad-supported apps by offering limited payment options in the Google Play store. Three quarters of all apps in the Google Play store are free, and many of those have ads supplied by Google or its daughter companies.
Due to the recent Play Store changes you can no longer "add text or images that indicate store performance or ranking, or suggest relations to existing Google Play programs in the app title" [1].
You can't, for example, add "#1", "best" or "free". However, you can't also add "no ads".
To be precise: appending "[small, no ads]", "[no ads]" or "[without ads]" to the play store app title causes a rejection. I didn't want to test more in fear of banning, and in the end removed it.
I know you can see if an app contains ads in the app page, but not in the search results... or at least not yet, but I doubt Google will add that indication.
So, let's be clear here. The problem is not that they've prohibited people from putting this information in the app title. The problem comes if they've done so without introducing another way for the user to express their preference for ad-free apps. E.g. it should even work better if, hypothetically, the search function prioritized ad-free apps anyway when the user puts "no ads" in the search box.
I can't tell if this is the case right now because, well, the store is still full of apps with "no ads" in the title. Those are still coming up first.
> I have never seen an add or a video on Google Play except a line of "Suggested for you" apps which I guess are paid for?
Yes, those are absolutely ads, they're explicitly labelled as such. And they're not very subtle, there's another double-tall row of them every other page when scrolling through the Play Store. There are also ads for other apps on every app page, and ads for search results. The search result ads are egregious - e.g. if I search for a major bank app, the first several results are for competing banks, they're barely differentiated from the legitimate results, and they're explicitly not what I'm looking for. I feel like I'm at an awful bazaar where I know what I want but slimy merchants keep yelling at me and getting in my way to shove their junk in my face.
I'd pay $10/m just to get rid of ads on the Play Store and Google Maps.
> The only videos are after clicking an app and then they have never ever started playing automatically.
There's a Play Store setting for controlling autoplay of videos.
> Neither my OnePlus or Google phones have it.
Play Store is a Google App, phone manufacturer has no impact.
FWIW, the store itself already displays whether the app has ads -- directly below the app title [1]. This seems reasonable to me. I'd imagine you probably couldn't add [no IAPs] to a title, either.
its trivial to add, yet hasn't been added in almost 15 years, it is very much a title text search and nothing about this move indicates otherwise.
there is no economic interest from google to make ad free apps actually findable, and no chance somebody making a better play store is going to usurp their position.
> Google has the same thing, and with apple if you care you can opt out.
I'm not on Android any more, but (afair) you could reset the advertising ID, which in practice is not that different from only being able to disable it temporarily.
>Why is an app able to display ads across the system
There is a permission on android called "Draw over other apps" which is disabled by default now when you install the app but the app can open a popup asking you to enable it which android warns you against accepting.
The valid use cases for this permission is you could have PIP for videos.
Yes its pretty bad but its not like any app can just draw adverts over the screen.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29497680
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