As Golem and Heise are writing today, Google has updated its rules for advertisement in Android Apps. Earlier this year, researchers from the SSE group and from Fraunhofer SIT have found that almost one third of the top apps in Google’s Play store use advertising services that in many instances violate the store’s content policy. The result is annoying for users, as these apps will plague them with very intrusive forms of advertisement that can be very hard to eliminate even for expert users. Early on, we have shared these results with Google and Google. The change by Google now obligates app developers to ensure that the ad frameworks they include in their app do not use any ad services violating Google’s policy.
Currently, the Google Play Store contains nearly 700000 apps . Most of them can be downloaded for free. These apps are developed by different kinds of developer, like hobby or semiprofessional developers or by actual software companies. To make some profit or get an allowance developers can augment these free apps with advertisement.
Advertising companies, such as leadbolt or airpush provide ready made ad libraries that developers can easily include in an application. Read the rest of this entry »
