Sneaky Mobile Ads Invade Android Phones

[Monty Solomon]

Download the wrong app to your Android phone, and you may end up with ads on
your home screen or notification bar. We'll tell you who's behind the
annoyance and how to get the ads off your phone.

Tom Spring, 4 Dec 2011

Are you wondering how that mysterious icon ended up on your Android phone's
start screen? Annoyed at the ads clogging your notification bar? You aren't
alone. Thousands of Android apps now include software that shoves marketing
icons onto your phone's start screen or pushes advertising into your
notification bar--and many of the apps give you no warning about the ad
invasion.

Many of these ads come from mobile marketing firms such as AirPush, Appenda,
LeadBolt, Moolah Media, and StartApp. The companies work with app developers
hungry for some way to make money from their smartphone software. By
bundling their adware into popular Android programs, these marketing
companies say they are now pushing ads to millions of new smartphones each
week.

Smartphone users generally hate the swarm of marketing on their
touchscreens, but the approach is growing fast. One of the companies,
AirPush, says 800,000 people a day download an Android app with its adware
inside--up from 250,000 just three months ago.

It may be next to impossible to completely avoid this kind of advertising on
your phone. I looked at dozens of apps that contain ad software and found
that few of them disclose that they contain adware. But there are ways to
get the ads off your phone, as we'll see below. ...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/245305/sneaky_mobile_ads_invade_android_phones.html

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