Hacker News Reader

For some context: Peel Remote is an app for using the IR blaster to control your TV/DVR. HTC used to have their own app for it, but it got discontinued so they put up Peel Remote as the replacement.

I was about to consider this a shame, as HTC's own app was pretty good, but not sure if I would trust them not to put ads in it anyway now.

View on HN

Samsung pulled the same thing years ago with the S4. They bundled "Beaming Service" to handle the IR blaster made by a third party company called MoBeam. MoBeam decided to start doing push ad notifications for their crappy coupon clipping app. After I was woken up after midnight by one, I decided I'd never buy a Samsung phone again. It couldn't be uninstalled or disabled. And this was before you could turn off notifications from a single app in Android.

The keyboard mentioned in the OP is also a third-party app (TouchPal). HTC's own keyboard included in older models never had ads as far as I know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com