Mobile Browsers Popups To App Store

In My Humble Opinion
1

Just wondering if anyone’s experienced this, or has any comments. It seems a very annoying, possibly serious issue. A good discussion is at http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/chrome/EDJTbPaW5dg/discussion

What happens is when browsing a site, without clicking on anything, your device will just switch to the App/Play Store page for an app. The app is usually of the kind that is free to play, but sells lots of expensive things inside. Some examples are kinds of legends/spartans games and Candy Crush. It happens on both iOS and Android. More disturbingly for Android, it doesn’t seem associated with specific websites, meaning the browser may be infected.

I mean, these are worse than popups and if they become common, then mobile browsers will be less safe than desktop. One theory on how this happens is ads use JavaScript to automatically open a link to the App Store. And they were touting how you could link to the store from your browser like it was a feature :rolleyes:

2

I’ve been having this occur a lot over the last couple of weeks on the mobile site for WRTV, the Indianapolis ABC affiliate. It was one of my usual hits when checking up on local news, but I’ve simply stopped going to their site because of the issue. (And, indeed, the app it links to is Candy Crush free version.) I figured it was some kind of malicious ad, and had been wondering if I should report it to WRTV. Luckily, this is the only site for which this occurs for me… thus far.

Off to read your link.