Most of us have a tolerance of seeing and accepting ads within the apps, but when the ads become too intrusive and annoying, it is probably best to use some counter measures to combat it. Occasionally, you will download an application and all of a sudden, you start seeing ads in the Android notification bar. The notification bar is commonly used for personal notification and having unremovable ads there is extremely annoying. Here is how you can remove them.To fix this problem, the best way is to remove the offensive apps. However, if you are someone who download a bunch of apps to try them out, finding the offensive app may be a difficult task (and you don’t want to delete every apps that you have downloaded). One option is to use an app to check for Android apps using Air Push notifications. Here are a few of the applications out there to help you remove notification bar ads on Android devices.
1. AirPush Detector
One of the most common kinds of ads in the notification bar is an AirPush advertisement. The AirPush Detector will scan all of the applications on your Android and find any known apps to use the AirPush ad system. When you have the list, you can start to delete the apps. Most of the time you can start with the most recently installed and work your way back to the oldest app.
2. Addons Detector
Addons Detector is a little different than AirPush Detector. Instead of searching for one type of ad system within the apps, Addons Detector searches for all of the known ad systems out there. Some of the other items Addons Detector looks for is:
- Which appstore the app is licensed to.
- Which app uses some sort of social gaming platform.
- Which apps use analytics to gather information.
- which apps have no addons at all.
When you see a list of Android apps using ads, you can tap on the app to see more. At the bottom of this screen is a button to take you to the manage app menu if you’d like to delete the offending app.
3. Norton Spot
Norton Spot is the newest of the group. The layout is really clean and simple with one button to push to start the scan. Depending on the number of apps installed and the speed of your phone, the scan should go pretty quickly. When the scan for ads is complete, you will see a list of which Android apps have suspicious behavior. The second tab are the offending apps in order of how much they will potentially annoy you. The notification bar ads bring the bad app to the top of the list as you can see here. The others you see in the image are using in-app ads.
Final thoughts
While some ads are tolerable in the apps, the notification bar ads seem to cause the most annoyance. I have found most of the offending applications are games. An example of a game with a push ad is Classic Snake 2. This game is a remake of the game built into the old Nokia devices. Every night this game pops up an ad in the notification bar. What a great thing to wake up to, right?
What are your thoughts about mobile advertising?