Samsung is still sending advertisements to users via push notifications

XDA

By Max Weinbach

Published Jul 17, 2018

Samsung was caught sending ads with push notifications 3 years ago. Despite much critisicm, they are doing it again with Push Services.

Samsung phones have a reputation for having a lot of bloatware pre-installed. At one point, there used to be a Samsung equivalent application for every Google app pre-installed. Nowadays, the software situation is a bit better with a lot less bloatware preinstalled on the latest Galaxy flagship devices. One area where Samsung hasn't improved on is their penchant for sending advertisements via push notifications.

Today, I received an advertisement from the Samsung Push Service offering me a $100 discount on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3. This discount is available to everyone and is listed on the Samsung website. The company is sending these notifications to users with the Samsung Galaxy S9 or Galaxy S9+. This advertisement is attempting to sell the Galaxy Tab S3 before the new Galaxy Tab S4 is released.

Three years ago AndroidPolice wrote an article about the company sending advertisements to their devices through Samsung Push Service. At that time the company was advertising the Galaxy S6 Edge+ in Germany. Last year, TheNextWeb wrote about the Samsung Games Launcher app sending ads about new free games to users with the Galaxy S8.

This new advertisement I received today is arguably worse than earlier push notifications as instead of advertising a free app through their own Game Launcher, it is advertising a product that costs $450. Maybe some of you may feel differently, but in my view, there's a difference between advertising some free applications and advertising expensive products.

If you've received these push notifications or any other advertisement from the Samsung Push Service and want to stop receiving them, you can disable the app using ADB. Just run the following command:

        adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.sec.spp.push

This will disable the app and will treat it as if it isn't installed on the device anymore. This will work on any Galaxy device from the past 3 years.

I don't think it's right for a company to be sending advertisements to people who already put down money for their product. When buying a device, I don't expect to get advertisements on it. I want my experience to be ad-free and bloat-free. Luckily, disabling Samsung Push Service can go a little way to help alleviate that.