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HTC Keyboard Ads Likely an Error, But Damage is Already Done (androidcentral.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Ads in the stock keyboard app on a flagship smartphone added quietly via an app update, which then asks you to pay to remove them. You'd be hard pressed to come up with a more comically villainous thing for a phone manufacturer, or app developer, to pull on its users. Yet that's what's been happening to some HTC phone owners over the past day. HTC 10 owners seem to be worst affected (we're not seeing it on the newer U11 for what it's worth), with the ad bar taking up a good chunk of screen real estate. There's understandable outrage among HTC owners whose phones have started coughing up ads every time they open the keyboard. The consensus, obviously, is that this is not an OK place for ads to be appearing. In a statement, HTC said it was an error, and a fix is underway.
Obvious flamebait, but the amount of advertising on the Android handset I owned got to be so overwhelming that it was one of the major reasons I am back to iPhone, after having given it up hoping for a more open and functional platform. Turned out, it wasn't.
Any company that pulls this type of crap should quickly dive into bankruptcy as it loses customers*
The reality is that most customers won't care.
* Note: this was deliberate. As others have pointed out, you don't accidentally put ads into an app. Also, why wasn't it pulled immediately? This was a deliberate attempt to test the reaction to ads in the keyboard app.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
THAT, friends, is why you root the shit out of Android and then use an app like AdAway, which uses the /etc/hosts file to block ads, which is why root is required. I tried other adblockers that didnt use the hosts file and none worked worth a damn.. Before I rooted my phone, it was endless ads in EVERYthing, and of course, this crap was eating up my data like mad, for which I pay for what I use (am on Ting.com). Once I rooted and installed AdAway, no more ads, and my data consumption went down signifcantly...
The problem with this is you lose access to a ton of apps that rely on "SafetyNet". Everything from Pokemon GO to AndroidPay to SnapChat uses SafetyNet and will refuse to run if it can detect that your system image has been modified or if it can detect that you have root access. (In SnapChat's case it only does this when you want to log in, so you can disable root, log in, then root again.) More and more apps are using SafetyNet, and it's fucking awful. It's a cat and mouse game to get root and still pass SafetyNet.