realme, oh realme, why hath you forsaken me?
realme, the Chinese budget smartphone brand has come out with some quite upsetting news. Not only have they made some similar moves to Redmi already (realme – redmi, any similarities?), this time they’ve gone off the wrong end. realme India posted in their community blog about implementing ‘Content Recommendations’ into ColorOS. And if that sounds to fancy, it simplifies into one thing: ads in your OS from the get go.
The silver lining here is that you can switch it off, but to me it seems predatory towards users who might not be as into checking all their settings and such. It’s just a toggle, but I’m pretty sure that there’s going to be a lot of people who miss it out completely.
The reason we’re saying it’s similar to Redmi, is because Redmi phones also have a similar mechanic where there are recommended apps to download. These ads can be pretty annoying, and that’s why it’s discouraging to see realme pick up the practice. And I’m not the only one who feels that way. Check out what some their own users had to say about this feature addition right on the blog post:
The way they’re positioning the ads is weird as well. In their blog post, they mentioned it would give users a “surprise”, which makes no sense. How about giving me a surprise like don’tstealallmydataandsellmysoultothedevil.
“To continue offering more surprises for you and maintain a healthy and sustainable business model, we have introduced commercial content recommendation in the OS. realme phones with ColorOS 6 and above will receive such recommendation updates.”
These promoted contests will have ads for apps and something they call “commercial links”. They’ll appear in the Phone Manager app and Security Check page.
Like I said, you can turn them off. So if you’ve got a realme device and it’s updated, check out Settings -> Additional Settings -> Content Recommendation. The changes should affect realme phones running ColorOS 6 and above, but no word on when exactly this will be rolling out, but this won’t be affecting users in Malaysia as realme have informed us.
