My mother got a brand new Samsung phone two days ago and I was shocked to find that it was showing her misleading full screen ads about her phone memory being full and how she needed to download some cleanup program from the Google store. She was not even browsing so I deduced that it had to be some built in app.
My first clue about which app it could be was a widget on her Home Screen advising her setup was not complete and that she needed to turn SMS home into her default SMS app. A web search yielded someone in Reddit complaining about the same thing.
After digging further, I found that somehow this SMS Home app had become the default launcher for the phone, which explained all the adds showing up out of nowhere. As soon as I turned Samsung’s One UI into the default launcher, the Home Screen cleared away and the ads stopped showing up… not before an Android message dialog showed up asking me to turn SMS Home into the default launcher. The app was still in memory aggressively trying to get the user of the phone to enable it again.
I finally made it all end by completely uninstalling the app. I also found that a lot of the other apps installed in her phone by default were apps of the same type: SMS apps full of adds and aggressively serving up misleading ads about installing other software.
According to my mother, she had not installed these apps. They were there by default, including the SMS Home app. This leads me to believe that her local carrier in Puerto Rico installed these apps on purpose when they gave her a brand new phone.
My mother is a non technical person and would never have caught this if I had not been around. Whoever installed the apps on what was supposed to be a pristine phone and the app makers are predators blatantly taking advantage of older non technical users
