HTC is showing literal ads on its flagship Android smartphones

HTC has recently started showing ads on top of the default keyboard on some of its Android flagship smartphones. Users are seeing ads for third-party services, possibly pulled from Google’s AdSense service, on top of the keyboard whenever they are typing something. The ads certainly are quite annoying for users, and a lot of the regular users aren’t happy with the change for obvious reasons.

Microsoft has been criticized for putting ads in Windows 10 before, but the company’s ads in Windows 10 aren’t as aggressive as the ones shown on HTC’s default keyboard. While Microsoft only shows ads for Windows Store apps and some of its own products like OneDrive, HTC is literally putting third-party ads on the keyboard. Interestingly, HTC might not be the main culprit here.

The default keyboard on HTC phones is actually built by a company called TouchPal, and it’s possible that the company added ads to the keyboard without even notifying HTC. At the moment, HTC is recommending users to uninstall the recent updates to the TouchPal keyboard which suggests HTC is probably getting rid of the ads sometime very soon.

Pls.go to Settings>Apps>All apps>Look for the app (TouchPal)>Uninstall updates. For assistance please go to https://t.co/etXmQQWcjL.

— HTC (@htc) July 16, 2017