South Korean electronics giant Samsung will stop showing advertisements in apps pre-installed on its Galaxy series of smartphones. The development will finally lay to rest an old consumer complaint over the unwanted promotional content that they were forced to consume despite spending hundreds of thousands on the company’s premium smartphones.
Samsung, like some Chinese manufacturers such as Xiaomi, serves ads on its phones, including the high-end Galaxy S21 Ultra and the recently launched Galaxy Z Flip 3. The company has announced some of its proprietary apps such as Samsung Weather, Samsung Theme, and Samsung Pay would no longer show ads following an update, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap.
T.M. Roh, the company’s mobile chief, announced during a recent town hall meeting that the company would remove ads from its native apps to improve user experience. The update will reach users later this year, Samsung later confirmed to The Verge.
The company told The Verge that it had decided to stop advertisements on proprietary apps such as Samsung Pay, Samsung Weather, and Samsung Theme and added that the update would be ready later this year.
According to Yonhap, Samsung will make the update available through a new One UI release. However, it has not made it clear if the change would be effective for all users, including those who have affordable Galaxy smartphones. The company is also tight-lipped on whether the update would be made available for users in India, as well as their counterparts around the world.
Some Samsung users took to Reddit last year to complain about the unwanted content on their smartphones. They shared screenshots to emphasise how the company showed ads of different sizes, which were not just text based but also with images. Some of these ads even covered a third of the phone screen.
