Advertising on smartphones is annoying and somehow disturbing - could a virus be to blame for the ads?
When surfing on your smartphone every day, you can make a typing mistake. If pop-up advertisements appear again and again when you open apps, the thought of a virus is not far off.
We are therefore familiar with inquiries like these:
“Hello, I think I have a small virus on my phone. When I open the Whatsapp app or the Yahoo Mail app, advertisements keep popping up. Even when I just unlock my cell phone, advertisements from e.g. Gmail or Google PlayStore pop into the picture. Now I'm worried that I have a virus. Funnily enough, I don't have any advertising on Facebook Messenger, which I had read on the internet that ads are now running there. But no one has this problem except me (…). What is that? Will it go away again? Can I block this? Because that's extremely annoying because it's really permanent. (…)”
So what's really all about annoying advertising?
First
It's (fortunately) not a virus , just stupid apps that finance themselves that way.
No advertisements appear at the beginning of the installation, but only after an update. We had the user send us screenshots of the installed apps. The first page looks harmless, all “well-known” apps, some of which were already pre-installed on the system.

On the second screen, however, you can identify apps that are less common: Asos and wetter.de

Pocket Mortys was previously installed, we recommended uninstalling these three apps one by one and seeing when the problem stops. After uninstalling Pocket Mortys, spam continued to appear on the smartphone, even on the lock screen.
On our advice, Asos was uninstalled as a second attempt (a fashion online shop with very cheap clothing, the website is also overflowing with advertising) and the problem with constantly popping up advertisements no longer occurred.
Conclusion:
If you have such problems, we recommend that you take a closer look at the installed apps, possibly compare them with the website and consider which apps are really necessary. You can make a note of the apps that you have deleted in advance, so that you can then use the elimination process to gradually delete the “identified” apps to see which one was the cause of your flood of advertising.
Three days later we received feedback that the smartphone was still “clean”.
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