Thousands reached breaking point with smartphone ads

With the launch of the Pixel 11 series, Google recently introduced something on older Pixels that certainly upset many users. The My Pixel app, formerly Pixel Tips, has sent push notifications to these users advertising various offers for the new phones and the Pixel Watch 5, often without consent.

Understandably, ads are incredibly annoying, especially when they’re pushed using official Android channels, such as the notification feature. But we wanted to know from our readers if advertising on our smartphones is getting out of hand. Well, it’s safe to say that the answer is a firm “Yes.”

We received more than 9,600 votes on this poll, highlighting the impact that ads on our smartphones have on all of us.

A remarkable 93.9% of respondents say that this practice has gone too far, while 6.1% don’t feel that ads on smartphones are a major problem.

The Pixel Tips ads are delivered via notifications, which require a separate suppression method. Using an official Android feature to deliver ads feels decidedly invasive, more so than merely displaying them on a visited web page.

However, ads on web pages, third-party apps, and elsewhere online can be contained using various free methods.

My personal favorite solution, NextDNS, can be deployed over multiple phones. Blokada is another standout offering that makes it super simple to target ads and trackers on single devices. Then, of course, there are various browser ad-blocking extensions, like uBlock Origin.

Thankfully, while ads continue to become a growing problem on our phones, there’s no shortage of ways to manage them.

What do you think of Google advertising its newer phones and devices using a system app and Android functionality? Have you disabled Pixel Tips notifications, uninstalled the app, or kept it installed just in case you require it? Let us know in the comments below.