Install games on android phone, get a bunch of spam pop-up crap as well. Any way to control this?

Factual Questions
1

My wife installs games willy-nilly and after a few weeks the phone becomes unusable due to all the pop-ups.

I go into setting and try to restrict Notification Permissions with limited success. Eventually I do a clean reset and we start again.

Is there any way to stop this?

2

This sounds like a user problem, not a device problem.

3

Look up how to block installs. There’s a number of ways so you need to decide what works for your situation.
Or get your wife her own phone and let her deal with it.

4

Pick the games that aren’t powered by those ads. Delete the games she doesn’t play and pay the $2 for the games she does.

Those ads pay the developers nearly nothing. You have to watch WAG a thousand ads to give them their $2. Seems a pretty obvious tradeoff to me.

5

There’s a few things you can do here… from easiest to hardest…

  1. Like everyone said, teach your wife to be a more careful user :slight_smile:
  2. Tell her to get a Google Play Pass and play those games only. It’s Google’s subscription service that provides a few hundred games, all Google-vetted and free of ads and in-app purchases. They’re typically excellent games in their own right, but these special versions (exclusive to Play Pass) are much less intrusive. Everything is included with your subscription and they don’t bug you to buy anything else or watch stupid ads.
  3. Get a systemwide ad blocker like Adguard. That will stop many, but not all, in-game ads. If you enable HTTPS filtering, it will block a lot more of them (but still not all).
  4. Make her an Android Private Space and tell her to install the games into that private space. That way they will be sandboxed, completely stopped as soon as she exits the private space, and can’t spam her with ads and notifications the rest of the time.

On second thought… maybe #1 would be the hardest? Depends on the specific wife model and version :wink:

6

Aye, there’s the rub.