Samsung To Stop Showing Ads In Stock Applications
Duane Beckett
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Samsung has announced that it will stop showing ads in its stock applications going forwards:
Showing advertisements inside stock applications is not something new or exclusive to Samsung. Other mobile companies like Xiaomi are also known for this practice.
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2020 Ad-dition
It wasn’t always like this on Samsung devices. These ads were introduced to Samsung’s stock applications like Samsung Music and Samsung Weather in 2020. And it received a lot of criticism for doing this practice:
Users were vocal on social media and the outrage was very real. People were rightfully upset that a phone that cost around $1,000 was also showing them ads.
Self Promotion
But to be fair to the company, these advertisements weren’t like your regular ad banners inside the free application. Samsung had not given access to ad networks to display targeted ads:
Instead, these ads were for Samsung products that the company itself wanted to promote. And even Samsung’s main rival is not pure of this practice since Apple also displays similar ads on iPhones as well.
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Korean News Outlet
But now these ads may soon be going away. Roh Tae-moon, the head of the mobile business division at Samsung announced this in an internal town hall meeting that was reported by Yonhap, a Korean media outlet.
This news comes out when an employee asked about Samsung showing ads and Roh Tae-moon confirmed that ads will be going away from the stock applications in the future.
“We have been seeking new growth opportunities in the fields of content and advertising services such as games and media to strengthen the integrated Galaxy ecosystem experience. It is our most important mission to innovate the consumer experience based on this.”
Roh Tae-moon, via sammobile.com
According to experts this change of heart isn’t really because Samsung cares about its customers, rather they might be doing this to retain their customers:
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Xioami Forcing Samsung To Change
Samsung has been really getting hammered by rival companies like Xioami, which are eating up Samsung’s market share. Xiaomi has already dethroned Samsung and become the largest smartphone brand globally.
As Samsung slipped to the second position in global smartphone rankings in June 2021. According to the numbers Samsung’s market share dropped to 15.7%. Xiaomi’s numbers climbed to the first position in June, with a market share of 17.1%. Apple on the other hand trails behind Samsung at 14.3%.
Just looking at Xiaomi’s sales on a month-by-month basis, it grew by 26% in May 2021. And Samsung is trying to battle that by providing cheaper variant phones to compete against Xiaomi’s offerings. And now with this change, Samsung might be looking to attract more people with their ads-free environment.
This announcement will be a welcome change for Samsung users as advertisements were really ruining the otherwise excellent user experience of Samsung’s One UI.
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