Which Android Apps Have Ads? Google Play Store Now Tells You
April 29 2016 - 04:33PM
Dow Jones News
By Nathan Olivarez-Giles
If you're annoyed by ads on your Android smartphone, you'll
appreciate a change that Google made to its app store this week.
Google Play now identifies apps that display ads while you're using
them.
In the Google Play app on Android phones and tablets, a line of
text will read "Contains ads" just beneath an ad-supported app's
green install button. This is the same spot where Google has long
pointed out apps that have in-app purchases.
"The goal is to provide more transparency and help users make
more informed decisions," a Google spokesman said, explaining why
the company made the change. The change was first spotted in a
forum of Android users on Reddit.
Advertising is everywhere these days: apps, websites, TV shows,
magazines, bus stops and billboards -- and of course all over The
Wall Street Journal. The National Basketball Association will be
placing ads on jerseys next season. Advertising is also the core
business for most of the tech companies we use on a daily basis --
Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Google itself, a subsidiary of
Alphabet Inc.
For Android apps, which bring in less money than Apple Inc.'s
iOS apps do , ads have been developers' bread and butter from the
start. For years, apps that cost money but were ad-free on iPhones
were, on Android, loaded with ads and given away for nothing.
Besides an annoyance, some may not want ads because they can add
an additional layer of tracking to an app. A recent peer-reviewed
study from Carnegie Mellon University found that many popular
Android apps collected a user's location as often as every three
minutes, and that 73% of the time, that location data is shared
with an advertising network.
The Play store change doesn't, of course, mean you'll be able to
avoid ads, if those ads are in apps you want. Avoiding apps with
ads won't rule out tracking, either. There are many ways app
developers track users, so pay attention to all of the permissions
you grant your apps -- a list that is also provided in Google
Play's app listings.
Write to Nathan Olivarez-Giles at
Nathan.Olivarez-giles@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 29, 2016 16:18 ET (20:18 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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