Coming soon to a carrier phone near you: Lock screen ads

Ad-tech company Glance promises users will “consume what is shown to them.”

Read the whole story

 

[harold93401]

Is this going to be a carrier sponsored thing, a manufacturer sponsored thing, or an OS sponsored thing? Is it opt in or opt out? If it suddenly shows up, I can see Verizon of Samsung getting swamped with customer support calls.

 

[powerpeecee]

Hell to the naw.

https://youtu.be/-K7fCQlUhj0

 

[Mr_Phil_O]

Just wait until we get Blipverts in in The Metaverse...

If those are the blipverts I’m thinking of, didn’t they have the unfortunate side effect of making the viewers head explode ?

Literally, not metaphorically

Brought down the top management at Station 23 when the story broke.

 

[randomcat]

Just wait until we get Blipverts in in The Metaverse...

If those are the blipverts I’m thinking of, didn’t they have the unfortunate side effect of making the viewers head explode ?

Literally, not metaphorically

Brought down the top management at Station 23 when the story broke.

SOME viewers' heads exploded, yes. Not all of them.

 

[SeanJW]

Just wait until we get Blipverts in in The Metaverse...

If those are the blipverts I’m thinking of, didn’t they have the unfortunate side effect of making the viewers head explode ?

Literally, not metaphorically

Brought down the top management at Station 23 when the story broke.

SOME viewers' heads exploded, yes. Not all of them.

Obese ones. Work out the percentage of viewers that would be in current western society.....

And we won't have a journalist hitting his head on a traffic barrier to create an AI for us I bet.

 

[randomcat]

Just wait until we get Blipverts in in The Metaverse...

If those are the blipverts I’m thinking of, didn’t they have the unfortunate side effect of making the viewers head explode ?

Literally, not metaphorically

Brought down the top management at Station 23 when the story broke.

SOME viewers' heads exploded, yes. Not all of them.

Obese ones. Work out the percentage of viewers that would be in current western society.....

And we won't have a journalist hitting his head on a traffic barrier to create an AI for us I bet.

Yeah well then we won't have a bizarro bastardized Super Mario Brothers universe where Bowser is an extradimensional dinosaur person either so it's not all bad

 

[zenparadox]

"Packed-in, often un-installable crapware "

often non uninstallable, I think you mean.

Ununinstallable.

U there, nun, install this for me please...

*shows self out*

 

[Mr_Phil_O]

Just wait until we get Blipverts in in The Metaverse...

If those are the blipverts I’m thinking of, didn’t they have the unfortunate side effect of making the viewers head explode ?

Literally, not metaphorically

Brought down the top management at Station 23 when the story broke.

SOME viewers' heads exploded, yes. Not all of them.

Obese ones. Work out the percentage of viewers that would be in current western society.....

And we won't have a journalist hitting his head on a traffic barrier to create an AI for us I bet.

Going (even further) off topic here but I suddenly have a new appreciation of the potential of the iPhone 14 pro MAX.

Imagine that guy on your Lock Screen. I’m conflicted.

 

[SeanJW]

Just wait until we get Blipverts in in The Metaverse...

If those are the blipverts I’m thinking of, didn’t they have the unfortunate side effect of making the viewers head explode ?

Literally, not metaphorically

Brought down the top management at Station 23 when the story broke.

SOME viewers' heads exploded, yes. Not all of them.

Obese ones. Work out the percentage of viewers that would be in current western society.....

And we won't have a journalist hitting his head on a traffic barrier to create an AI for us I bet.

Going (even further) off topic here but I suddenly have a new appreciation of the potential of the iPhone 14 pro MAX.

Imagine that guy on your Lock Screen. I’m conflicted.

Siri voice alternative. With "Hey Siri" supplemented with "Hey Max". Complete with stuttering.

 

[Mr_Phil_O]

Just wait until we get Blipverts in in The Metaverse...

If those are the blipverts I’m thinking of, didn’t they have the unfortunate side effect of making the viewers head explode ?

Literally, not metaphorically

Brought down the top management at Station 23 when the story broke.

SOME viewers' heads exploded, yes. Not all of them.

Obese ones. Work out the percentage of viewers that would be in current western society.....

And we won't have a journalist hitting his head on a traffic barrier to create an AI for us I bet.

Going (even further) off topic here but I suddenly have a new appreciation of the potential of the iPhone 14 pro MAX.

Imagine that guy on your Lock Screen. I’m conflicted.

Siri voice alternative. With "Hey Siri" supplemented with "Hey Max". Complete with stuttering.

NOW we're getting somewhere. Craig Federighi - take note

 

[MDWking]

Classic android move

 

[OccasionallyLeftHanded]

You know, I put up with the ad supported kindle edition because it's something that only comes up a couple times in a reading session, and (to date) on the reading focused kindles have been at least topical - unlike the Fire tablets which are a virtual slots shitshow.

Ads on my phone lockscreen? Yea, hard pass on that.

~edit for readability.

I was creeped out just reading about ads on my Lock Screen. But having to sit through a video of any length to unlock? Beyond creepy. Imagine someone having to make an emergency call but sitting through this. Or trying to quietly call 911 and having a video ad blurt out this crap?

Nope. Nope. Nope.

 

[cto1011]

Sounds like even more reason to not buy the phone from the carrier.

 

[Moonscript]

I have two words for Glance. The second one is "off."

 

[Tyrannosaurus Rex]

Root and custom firmware. It's out there, and it's free.

I was thinking about getting an Android phone this year to replace my old iPhone 8 Plus, which still works perfectly fine. I'll probably just stick with the iPhone.

 

[acefsw]

InMobi makes malware.

I bought an Acer tablet for my mother, I removed as much of the bloatware as I could, and removed permissions from what I couldn't. It is completely unusable with the InMobi software running, everything grinds to a halt. Manually kill it, and the tablet runs just fine, until it restarts itself. I don't know if it's an issue with it timing out because it can't reach it's server, and I'm not willing to let it spy on me just to find out.

And, I can't root it, because setting the option to unlock the bootloader or whatever does nothing. And it's not a popular enough tablet that people who actually know what they are doing have bothered to try.

Last Acer product I ever buy. And InMobi can FOAD.

You don't need root, you can use ADB to remove those packages. There's an app called LADB you can download from the play store and do it on device without a computer - if it's android 11 or above - or you can install ADB on a laptop and debug over wifi or USB connection. The commands are simple.

adb shell

pm list packages

pm uninstall -k --user 0 package name

e.g.
pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.google.android.youtube

Get a list of known InMobi bloatware packages, (and other bloatware you don't want) beforehand for reference to compare to your install list and uninstall. Don't uninstall packages if you don't know what they are.

XDA developers is a good source for lists of common bloatware and ADB tutorials.

 

[Wheaty73]

Here is the absolute use case for folding phones then. Can't see ads if you can't see the screen!

 

[scpATL4now]

We get closer and closer to that "Black Mirror" episode every day with being forced to see ads

 

[ackmondual]

I'm really tired of seeing a picture of my family and missed notifications when I first look at my phone. Seeing a bunch of ads sounds like a nice change of pace!!!

In all serious I can see this becoming a thing for cheap phones. Which is a shame because the people that this would target probably have lower data caps and possibly influenced by this kind of marketing more. What would be super terrible is if they make you interact with so many ads a month. Oh you haven't interacted with 5 ads this month you can't get to your home page without interacting with at least one today. I can see this being abused and I hope this doesn't gain any traction.

Except that there's no way it'll stay on only the cheap phones if it gets it's nose in the door. Spyvertizers don't really want to advertise to people so poor they can only afford a $50 piece of junk - mind you they'll do it because it requires near zero effort - what they really want is to worm their way into the minds of and siphon dry the bank accounts of people who can afford $1550 phones. The latter - they think - can be mindfucked into buying much more expensive crap.

On a related note, this is why the "fragmentation" on Android is largely a thing of the past. This was mentioned in a seminar held by a couple of Android devs back around 2013. People buying $50 Android phones (or even getting them for free) were probably not going to be interested in buying your apps, so you can not worry about supporting those OS versions and models.

 

[Great_Scott]

... wow, someone found a way to make it so that even I would go back to an iPhone. I didn't think that was possible, and yet here we are.

This is literally the best advertisement for Apple that could possibly exist. (And the sheer number of people saying the same thing demonstrates that like their products or not, Apple is viewed very clearly as having the actual user as their customer, whereas Android phone makers by and large are not.)

Don't worry, at some point Apple will buy Glance - both the get the technology for themselves, and to profit off the Android ecosystem.