Samsung recently announced that it would cease advertising within some of its “basic” stock apps, which are natively built into many of its phones like the Samsung Galaxy S21, and its tablets. Now, it's finally started to do just that beginning with a simple update to its weather app.
Samsung, which is also the world’s leading smartphone manufacturer, has a strong track record of churning out highly capable devices as seen in our best Samsung phones. But users have, perhaps strangely, always had to contend with Samsung embedding ads in its core applications, making the whole user experience slightly less clean than it could be without these ads.
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After introducing its new interface, One UI, the South Korean giant had continued to display ads in its users’ most popular apps. This only sought to stir things up amongst users. Following a wave of complaints, as well as protests from Samsung employees themselves, the company announced that it would remove ads from its smartphones via future One UI software updates.
The Korean news outlet Yonhap first picked up the report, which was then later verified via The Verge. Both note that Samsung will no longer make its users have to disable ads within Samsung Weather, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Theme apps. It signals an end to a long period of users having to put up with Samsung’s in-app advertising.
Simple solutions
The ad-removal process really is as simple as it says, as well: the most recent version of the weather app that comes pre-loaded on Samsung devices now removes the app's ads once and for all. As such, installing the latest update to Samsung's native weather app should sterilize your own Samsung device's weather app moving forwards. All it took was a simple update, plus there are more expected to follow for the other Samsung stock apps, which should eventually add up to an ad-free device.
In other news, Samsung has been busy in the wearables department, rolling out a new Walkie Talkie app for the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 Classic following their launch last week. Well worth a look if you're the lucky owner of one of these brand-new smartwatches.
