Airpush Wants to Destroy Android | Hacker News Reader

Airpush Wants to Destroy Android

joshuascholl.posterous.com

13 pointsVengefulCynic10 comments

Self policing is working fairly well so far. Any developer who uses AirPush is taking a huge gamble. Personally I will uninstall the app, report it as malicious malware, and write a scathing review of any app that uses AirPush. I hope others are doing the same. The problem is going to be what happens when the carriers pre-load applications using AirPush along with a locked boot loader to prevent you from rooting your phone to remove it. That's the point where you'll see an exodus from Android. I really don't think people will put up with it. The carriers will almost certainly try it because what do they have to lose? They will probably start up-selling ad/bloatware removal like Best Buy does with PCs.

How will you know which app is using AirPush? There is no way to know where a notification comes from in Android, and as the article explains, it's possible for developers to delay the notification for days.

Fair point but a bit exaggerated, in my opinion. You won't see an "exodus from Android", just from that particular phone that comes preloaded with unremovable crapware.

The market tends to autocorrect itself pretty quickly for this kind of thing.

I don't get why people would say Airpush would never exist on iOS. It already does. I have seen quite a few app that use push notifications for advertisements. Not just scammy apps, but popular well recieved apps like Boxcar that hide it by labelling it App Recommendations.

Push notifications' promise always included ads. It is just a matter of presenting them well. It is like nagware. The annoying ones will be punished, the effective ones will be rewarded.

Boxcar hasn't sent me an ad via push notification in my two years of using it.

Because you have not asked for App Recommendations. Like I said, it is about presentation. Boxcar does it right with an opt in service that provides value.

Except half of Boxcar's functionality is to provide advertising. That's a lot like saying "I don't know why people complain about the Huffington Post and all of their advertising when reputable sites like eBay are nothing but people trying to sell me stuff."

And let's not get ahead of ourselves with the whole "push notifications have always been ads" - push notifications have always been with providing the end user with desired information. That may well come to include advertising, but up until this point advertising in push notifications has been an outlier at best.

Outlier now, but a pretty unavoidable future. Telemarketers and spammers were outliers at one point.

Really? Ads that appear while the app is not running, with no idicator of which app is the culprit? I'm having trouble thinking of iOS APIs that could accomplish such a feat.

People went rabid went some apps started showing ads as notifications. They will continue to do so for any app that implements it. This is going to police itself initially, and I'm guessing Google will do something about eventually.

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