Question for the Android savvy

[Duke Bushido]

Okay, so a couple of days ago, on the recommendation of several acquaintances and one of my brothers, I installed an so called AdClean Play.

 

I am completely perplexed: it works _beautifully_,  I mean it is unobtrusive, sits in the background, and can be toggled on and off as desired.  There are no ads on websites; there are no ads on YouTube; there are no ads when one of the kids is playing games on the phone.

 

So whats the problem?

 

There isn't one.  Thats the problem: there is no problem, no annoyance, no complications, no work arounds-

 

And it was free.

 

There ya go.  Thats why I am a bit concerned.  TANSTAAFL and all that.  First law of consumerism: if something is free to you, then _you_ are the product.

 

 

Anyone out there know anything about the dark ugly side of this thing?  I ask because all I can find are rumors and assumptions.  I don't want to give up something this efficient for an unsabstantiated rumor.  I mean, imgur is suddenly not a hot mess that takes four minutes to load!  This thing is great!

 

So what are they up to?  Anyone?

 

 

 

[L. Marcus]

... Harvesting your organs i your sleep?

[Tjack]

    I don’t know what their getting out of it, but I agree with your assessment.  If it didn’t have some upside for them they’d promote it as some kind of “doing good for the internet” social thing. If they’re not being clear about their motives then there’s good reason to be wary.  There’s cheese in the trap for a reason.

[eepjr24]

It's developed by Seven Networks. From their XDA forum:

 

Quote

"How Do You Make Money?"
The truth is, we don't right now. What we are doing is creating a source of analytics from our users in order to fix bugs and improve the app. This includes your device, android version, battery life, and app usage. You are assigned a UUID that completely separates you from your device and data, and there is no feasible way for us to personally identify you. If you'd like, uninstalling and reinstalling the app will give you a completely new UUID that cannot be connected to the previous one. We only use this to rapidly analyze and change our product.

In the future we may sell anonymized data to carriers, but that's one idea of many. That's part of what we want to know from you. This is a unique business plan for the ad blocking market. Would you be more inclined toward an acceptable ads or freemium model (premium being opting out of analytics)? Our main priority is to provide a high quality experience based on user suggestions to YOU at a high development pace. After a post we made on reddit got a bit of traction, we added a log, selectable app filter, and on/off switch based off of suggestions within the next few days. We want to get that type of feedback, that help, from XDA, and we're excited about the DEVDB platform. We've included the feature request and bug report sections and we hope that they are used! Either way, we're excited to have address these things with you in the comments.

 

They are profitable without this product so my suspicion is that they will charge (for some meaning of the word) for it once they figure out the best way to monetize it.

 

If you read through their thread history you will see that they have had outages and the like from a week to a couple months at various times as the team got called to work on their actual profitable applications. Just a suspicion again, but I suspect this is a love project by the dev team that they are hopefully will pay off for them at some point.

 

- E

[Chris Goodwin]

The downside I can see from reading the reviews is that it appears to just stop working at some point. It looks like it goes through their VPN and they may monitor your traffic. And in a bit of irony, it looks like it's ad supported, so it could be that the point at which it stops working is the point at which it starts serving its own ads.  

 

~10K downloads, 166 reviews, and it looks like about half as many 1 star reviews as 5 star reviews. I wouldn't touch it myself.

 

Edit for clarity:  Duke shared the link with me to the one he's using:  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ad.clean.master

 

The developer contact for that one is listed as a gmail address.  It's looking even more sketchy.  

[Duke Bushido]

Thanks, folks.

 

And Chris:   I ended up going with "Thanks for watching, Karen!  Glad you liked it!"

 

I cant help it.  You know good and well that anyone who uses "news flash" or "pro tip" in a conversation is a complete gibbon to begin with.

 

 

[Chris Goodwin]

Here's one I found that is at 4.4 stars with 677 reviews.  The vast majority are 5 stars, and the developer has its own domain name and a postal address out of Cypress (the country).  

 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adguard.vpn

 

Edit:  This one apparently is not an actual ad blocker.  Hmmm.

[Chris Goodwin]

Here's a highly technical diagram of my network setup at home.  

 

At the lower right is a Raspberry Pi running software called Pi-hole, which is a very good ad blocker.  It doesn't block Youtube ads, but it does get most others.  If there's something I can't use without viewing the ads, I can switch my phone to the external wifi (Xfinity's box), then switch back when I'm done.  

 

It's not perfect, and it obviously doesn't work when I'm not at home, but it's Good Enough.

[Pattern Ghost]

Ublock Origin kills the YouTube ads. Unfortunately, it's a desktop browser extension, so no Android option.