So an ad network has come up with a novel idea to help android developers make money from their apps by forcing the user to upgrade to their paid version.
I became aware of this when I was reading the update notes for the app APNdroid and noticed that the app would start to display ads in notification bar. The note was keen to stress that it was only 1 ad per day but I decided against updating the app and it certainly didn’t make me want to upgrade to the paid version.
Here is the promo video for the notification ads:
As an android developer myself I was interested to see if this approach actually worked and the full evidence suggesting no is shown in the reviews of APNdroid.
After several hundred 1 star reviews the developer (Martin Adamek) posted an update to the app which removed the adverts stating
Removed notification ads. Thanks for the feedback, it has been enormous. And yes, I am an idiot.
Lesson learned. Users don’t like having adverts forces on them at convenient times