How to Block Jio from Showing Ads on your Android Phone
Ever since I added the Reliance Jio 4G SIM on my Android phone, I’ve been bombarded with fullscreen overlay ads. The ads appear intermittently but they’ll almost always show up after you disconnect a phone call or when you are charging the device.
Yes, I’m talking about those random full-screen advertisements which pop up even when a Jio app is not active in the background on your Android phone.
Jio’s apps have cunningly enabled a permission which essentially allows themselves to overlay content on any other application. Therefore, it doesn’t matter if you are using them or not. The fix is quite straightforward, though. You merely need to disable the permission setting for each app that belongs to Jio’s suite of services such as JioMusic, JioTV, JioCinema, and others. Unfortunately, you’ll have to repeat the process for every one of them.
I use a limited number of Android apps from known developers and was fairly certain that adware was related to the Jio phone service. After fiddling with every possible setting inside Android to disable the ads, I turned to Twitter for help.
You can read the entire Twitter thread or here’s a quickly summary:
You can read the entire Twitter thread or here’s a quickly summary:Revoke all permissions of Jio apps. Long press the app icon, press the info button, go to App Permission and uncheck everything. Also turn off the “draw over the apps” permission for Jio apps.
For Android Oreo or later, go to Settings > Apps > MyJio and turn off the “App can appear on top” setting. You probably need to do this for every Jio app on the device.
Root the phone and install AdAway, an ad block that uses the hosts file to block specific hostnames and IP addresses.
Use Greenify to hibernate all the Jio apps and prevent the app from running in the background.
Disable ‘Telephone’ access for all Jio apps. Even Jio Mags has default access to ‘Telephone’!
Toggle background data to disable data access for all Jio related apps.
Unfortunately, none of these suggestions worked.
Meanwhile, the Jio team contacted me after seeing the tweet and asked for the IMEI number of the phone.
A week later, I got a call from the Jio support team saying that the problem should be resolved.
Yes, I was no longer getting any pop-up ads on my phone despite having all the Jio apps as before. What changed? It turned out, the Jio support representative told me, that these ads can only be disabled by Jio for the requested phone number on the server side.
Yes, I was no longer getting any pop-up ads on my phone despite having all the Jio apps as before. What changed? It turned out, the Jio support representative told me, that these ads can only be disabled by Jio for the requested phone number on the server side.
Comments
Post a Comment