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I have used a Samsung Galaxy smartphone almost every day for almost 4 years. I used them because Samsung had fantastic hardware that matched (generally) excellent software. But in 2020, a Samsung phone is no longer my daily driver, and there is a simple reason: the ads.
Ads everywhere
The ads on Samsung phones never bothered me, at least not until the past few months. It started with the Galaxy Z Flip. A tweet from CNBC’s Todd Haselton, embedded below, is what really caught my eye. Samsung had placed a DirectTV ad on the stock marking app. This is truly something you would never have expected from any smartphone company, let alone Samsung.
Samsung has ads in the phone app, the app it opens for making calls, on its $ 1,380 Galaxy Z Flip. 🙄 pic.twitter.com/tuWr2PxSYh
– Todd Haselton (@robotodd) February 18, 2020
It appeared on the “Places” tab in the bookmarking app, which is in partnership with Yelp and allows you to search for different businesses directly from the bookmarking app so you don’t need to Google somewhere to find the address or phone number . I researched it to see if maybe it was a mistake on Yelp’s part, accidentally showing an ad where it shouldn’t have, but no. The ad was placed by Samsung, in an area where it could be mixed so they could make money.
Similar ads exist in many Samsung apps. Samsung Music has ads that look like another track in its library. Samsung Health and Samsung Pay have banners for promotional ads. The stock weather app has ads that appear to be news. There is also more often very blatant advertising in most of these applications.
Samsung Music will give you a popup for Sirius XM, even though Spotify is built into the Samsung Music app. You can hide the SiriusXM popup, but only for 7 days at a time. A week later, he will come back there waiting for you. Samsung will also give you push notification notices for new Bixby, Samsung Pay and Samsung Push Service products.
I have this on my Note9. I’m not sure if it’s because my Note9 thinks it’s a Note10 or if it’s an ad. pic.twitter.com/CeD2KfmidE
– Max Weinbach (@MaxWinebach) August 9, 2019
Are you kidding me … pic.twitter.com/hRV0aU9B3H
– Max Weinbach (@MaxWinebach) June 21, 2020
If you’re wondering which Samsung apps have ads, I’ve listed all the ones I’ve seen ads and ad-free alternatives below.
Why are there even ads in the first place?
To really understand Samsung’s absurd and terrible advertising on your smartphones, you must understand why big companies advertise. Google advertises because its “free services” still cost money to provide them. The ads that serve you on Google services help cover the cost of those 15 GB of storage, the Google Voice phone number, the unlimited storage of Google Photos and more. That’s all to say there is a reason for it, you are getting something in exchange for those ads.
Websites and YouTube channels offer ads because the content they provide to you for free is not free to them. They must be compensated for what they are providing you for free. Again, you’re getting something free, and serving an ad acts as a form of payment. There was no purchase of a product, hardware or software for you to have access to its content and services.
Even Samsung’s top-tier foldable ones come packed with ads.
Where it differs with Samsung is that you are paying, for your hardware. My $ 1,980 Galaxy Fold receives ads while using the phone as anyone would. While Samsung does not tell us the profit margins for its products, it would not exhaust anyone’s imagination to suggest that these margins should be able to cover the cost of services, ten times over. Maybe I could understand having ads on phones under $ 300 where margins are probably much lower, but I think we can all agree that a phone that costs close to $ 1,000 (or in my case, much more) It shouldn’t be riddled with ads. Margins should be high enough to cover these services, and if they don’t, Samsung is running a bad business.
These ads appear on my $ 1,980 Galaxy Fold, $ 1,380 Z Flip, $ 1,400 S20 Ultra, $ 1,200 S20 +, $ 1,100 Note 10+, $ 1,000 S10 +, and $ 750 S10e along with the A10e $ 100. I can understand that on a $ 100 phone, but it’s inexcusable to have them on a $ 750 phone, let alone a $ 1980 phone.
All other major phone manufacturers offer basically the same services without requiring advertisements in their stock applications to subsidize them. OnePlus, OPPO, Huawei, and LG all have weather apps, paid apps, phone apps, and even health apps that don’t show ads. Sure, some of these OEMs include pre-installed bloatware, like Facebook, Spotify, and Netflix, but they can generally be disabled or uninstalled. Samsung ads can’t (at least not completely).
When you consider that Samsung not only sells among the most expensive smartphones that money can buy, but blatantly uses them as an advertising revenue platform, you are left with an obvious conclusion: Samsung is becoming greedy. Samsung is just being greedy. They hope that most Samsung customers will not switch to other phones and ignore and deal with ads. While that’s a very greedy and honestly bad tactic, it worked largely until they started pushing it with more ads in more apps.
You can’t disable them
If you are a Samsung user who has read all this, you may be wondering “how do I turn off the ads?” The answer is, unfortunately, you (mostly) can’t.
You can disable Samsung Push Services, which is sometimes used to send you notifications from Samsung apps. Therefore, disabling Push Services means there will be no more push notification ads, but no more push notifications in some Samsung apps.
There is no real way to disable Samsung’s many ads.
You can disable personalized marketing notifications in Settings, but that only disables targeted ads, which means the ads will still show, they just won’t be personal to you. You can disable Personalization Services, which Samsung uses to extract your data to get targeted ads, but once again you will continue to receive the ads. Unfortunately, you can’t get rid of Samsung ads.
Some of you may not notice ads on your Samsung phone. Chances are you don’t have them, but chances are you don’t use any Samsung apps that show ads, or there are ads in some of the apps you use, and you just don’t notice them. As I mentioned earlier, Samsung does a great job of hiding its ads and making them look like native content that you would normally find in the respective app. This is by design.
The solution
Samsung, you already know the solution. It is to get rid of the ads. There is no good reason to have ads after charging us these extremely high prices and the only way to remedy this is to get rid of them entirely. While I think there should be no ads on any smartphone, it is especially notorious to put them on phones that cost what Samsung does. And if Samsung claims it needs ads to subsidize the price of the phone or the included services, it’s doing bad business.
But we both know that the ads are not going to go away. So how about you make them a little easier to use? Give us an option to disable ads entirely. It doesn’t need to be fancy at all, just a change in settings that allows you to opt out of receiving system-level announcements in all Samsung apps. If someone doesn’t opt out of the ads, reward them with Samsung’s monthly rewards points.
The other option is to make all of these ads part of Samsung’s global goals. Global Goals is a United Nations innovation that helps try to support 17 different goals to create a better world. With the release of Note 10, Samsung launched a Global Goals app that allowed customers to easily donate to those 17 goals. You can use Samsung Pay, Google Pay, or enable ads on your lock screen to add them to an in-app income group that can then donate to those 17 targets.
What Samsung could do is make all of these ads part of the app’s revenue. After some simple math and testing on the Global Goals, each ad is worth about 5 cents to me. If Samsung made the announcements on Samsung Pay, Samsung Health, Bixby, Samsung Weather, Samsung Music and others, it would follow this goal.
Samsung’s global goals could make better use of this advertising money.
A conservative estimate might be that the typical owner of a Galaxy phone sees about one ad per day in one of the Samsung apps. For the sake of this article, I’m going to say that the CPM, the cost of viewing per thousand users, of an ad in a Samsung app is about $ 5. It could be more, it could be less, it is for illustrative purposes only. . We know that Samsung shipped around 300 million phones in 2019. If we say that, on average, Samsung is running an ad for every Samsung phone it sold in 2019 every day, that represents $ 500 million a year in advertising revenue. And that’s only for the phones they sold in 2019! There are 2.5 billion Android users on Earth, and Samsung is at least 20% of them, so they are likely to have around 500 million monthly active users right now.
This is very basic math: some clients will not receive ads and others will receive more than one. The CPM for those ads will vary greatly by country. Unfortunately, we don’t have the actual numbers, and Samsung won’t be providing them soon. But still, it’s clear that Samsung is making enough money from ads that, if this income were donated to charities, it could make a real difference.
But whether or not he goes to charity really isn’t the point. The point is, something needs to change, Samsung. It doesn’t necessarily have to be one of my previous suggestions, but something has to happen. This is a bad aspect, and it is something that we as a technology community will not forget or ignore. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on Samsung phones hoping to buy a product, but since I’ve used those phones, I’ve become The product that Samsung sells. That just doesn’t feel good.
