Adware Apps and Google doing absolutely nothing about them.

[Sammyz]

Hello,

 

Yes, I am new here, yes this is my first post. I work as a cell phone salesmen at Walmart and EVERY single day I have elderly customers come to me saying their phone is messed up. Low and behold it's just adware apps. Phone cleaners/boosters/weird weather apps. You name it! Google has taken 0 action against these kinds of apps and the worst part is that if you download "Messenger Home" or "Weather Home" you'll get your home screen taken over by their "Home" GUI. And then it will make fake notifications appear such as "your phone is slow, download phone cleaner to clean up memory" etc. etc.

 

Obviously it's easy to uninstall this stuff, you just boot into safe mode by long pressing the power button that appears on the screen after long pressing the physical button and then you're given an option to boot into safe mode so that only system apps necessary for android load. It also loads the phone in airplane mode when loaded in safe mode.

 

This is only a problem with android phones for the most part. I've yet to come across a similar problem with iOS. Now these adware apps basically tell you to download app after app after app to the point your phone is slower than a snail. These apps also advertise themselves on all kinds of games and other apps. I've seen "Weather Home" advertised on the Avast anti-virus app! Part of me thinks that if you dig deep enough into this rabbit hole of app downloads, you might at some point download malware, a trojan, a virus, or all of the above.

 

Here's a couple if someone has a burner phone or android emulator they'd like to test these on.

DO NOT INSTALL THESE APPS ON YOUR DAILY PHONE AND/OR DAILY TABLET, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Weather Home: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.home.weather.radar&hl=en_US&pli=1

One Booster: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cleanteam.oneboost&hl=en_US

Messenger Home: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.myhomescreen.sms&hl=en_US

 

Read the reviews on there. People keep reviewing how it takes over the home screen and does all kinds of hijacking while somehow still being allowed to be advertised as well as downloaded off the play store. There's obviously a bunch of fake reviews on there for the 5 stars.

 

It's absurd and someone should definitely pick this up to report on. There are so many apps like this. Whether the LTT team picks this up or another tech reporting team picks it up is fine by me, I would just love it if Google would take action, as I have reported these apps multiple times for a year straight now and nothing happens.

[jaslion]

Thing is that google runs those ads

 

Its all money for them people click on the ads is even better. They dont care its malicious at all. Like go on google search and search for idk obs studio, first couple ad links are normally fake links yo malicious installers

 

Consumers arent seen as a number of customers anymore we are seen as a hindrance to our money

[Blqckqut]

40 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Consumers arent seen as a number of customers anymore we are seen as a hindrance to our money

this is becoming so obvious with recent stuff, games, phones (apple im looking at you), some cpus and gpus even, just look at nvidea vs amd, amd has good gpus sure, and nvidea oo, nvidea just uses its status as a 'reliable company' to boost the prices on their gpus (looking mostly at 3070 and 3080, 3080 here is 1000 and rx 6800xt is 650 and bascicaly the same thing)

[jaslion]

1 hour ago, Blqckout said:

this is becoming so obvious with recent stuff, games, phones (apple im looking at you), some cpus and gpus even, just look at nvidea vs amd, amd has good gpus sure, and nvidea oo, nvidea just uses its status as a 'reliable company' to boost the prices on their gpus (looking mostly at 3070 and 3080, 3080 here is 1000 and rx 6800xt is 650 and bascicaly the same thing)

Or ya know things like food, water,...

[Blqckqut]

6 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Or ya know things like food, water,...

i havent rlly seen any price increase in it, maybe in your country but here its less than a euro for a liter of water, like 0.69 

[jaslion]

1 hour ago, Blqckout said:

i havent rlly seen any price increase in it, maybe in your country but here its less than a euro for a liter of water, like 0.69 

25% or more here on everything

[Blqckqut]

11 minutes ago, jaslion said:

25% or more here on everything

oh that aint good

[Sammyz]

7 hours ago, jaslion said:

Thing is that google runs those ads

 

Its all money for them people click on the ads is even better. They dont care its malicious at all. Like go on google search and search for idk obs studio, first couple ad links are normally fake links yo malicious installers

 

Consumers arent seen as a number of customers anymore we are seen as a hindrance to our money

But doesn't Google's ToS say that apps on the app store should not be malicious/misleading? And doesn't their advertising ToS say the same thing?

 

It's like YouTube spam and YouTube not doing anything up until it got reported on, but this is way worse in my opinion.

[Sammyz]

3 hours ago, jaslion said:

25% or more here on everything

Eggs are literally 200% more here in the "United" States.

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, Sammyz said:

But doesn't Google's ToS say that apps on the app store should not be malicious/misleading? And doesn't their advertising ToS say the same thing?

 

It's like YouTube spam and YouTube not doing anything up until it got reported on, but this is way worse in my opinion.

Costs money and often those bad things also makes them money so until it gets bad enough they'll ignore it/allocate minimal resources to it

[Sammyz]

1 minute ago, jaslion said:

Costs money and often those bad things also makes them money so until it gets bad enough they'll ignore it/allocate minimal resources to it

Right, which is why an informative article/video on these apps, with a huge audience might just be what's needed to break Google off from allowing these malicious apps on their app store.

 

But I cannot even find blog posts on these apps, literally nobody has made any type of publication on these apps and it boggles my mind. When I search these apps on Google, I don't find publications about them, I just get alternative links to download the same app.

[Sammyz]

Actually there is ONE publication guide on it from HowToRemove:

 

https://howtoremove.guide/weather-home-app-malware/

 

But thats good for after the fact and it only comes up in search results if you search "weather home malicious". 

 

12 minutes ago, Sammyz said:

Right, which is why an informative article/video on these apps, with a huge audience might just be what's needed to break Google off from allowing these malicious apps on their app store.

 

But I cannot even find blog posts on these apps, literally nobody has made any type of publication on these apps and it boggles my mind. When I search these apps on Google, I don't find publications about them, I just get alternative links to download the same app.

 

[jaslion]

1 minute ago, Sammyz said:

Actually there is ONE publication guide on it from HowToRemove:

 

https://howtoremove.guide/weather-home-app-malware/

 

But thats good for after the fact and it only comes up in search results if you search "weather home malicious". 

 

 

These are just one of many in a sea of malicious apps. The moment these get removed clones immediatly pop up its a losing battle and most end users wont care to watch or read an informative piece

[Sammyz]

10 minutes ago, jaslion said:

These are just one of many in a sea of malicious apps. The moment these get removed clones immediatly pop up its a losing battle and most end users wont care to watch or read an informative piece

There's gotta be an easier way for Google to keep these apps from going up. To me it seems like all Google does is run it through a virus scanner and that's it, and of course since all the app does is make itself the home screen app and make annoying pop-ups, it doesn't get detected by anything.

 

I don't know how the play store publication of apps work, but it seems like they just let anybody upload anything at this rate.

[Sammyz]

29 minutes ago, jaslion said:

These are just one of many in a sea of malicious apps. The moment these get removed clones immediatly pop up its a losing battle and most end users wont care to watch or read an informative piece

Actually, I do like watching people install viruses for fun, look at BasicallyHomeless on YouTube. He's done a couple videos on installing viruses/malware/etc on his PC.

 

Video idea: Installing all the adware from Google play store and clicking all the things.