Today I got an email from Airpush, advising me that I can use their ad network to monetize my apps. My response: NO WAY!

For those of you who don’t know what Airpush is, you may have seen it and not realized it. It’s an ad network which displays ads in your notification panel. It’s the most intrusive and annoying way EVER to display ads. I have actually stopped using a few apps because they had Airpush ads.

The biggest problem: most of the time you don’t even know what app is displaying the ad! You see this ad in your notifications and think “Oh man, what malware did I download unknowingly?”

As a piece of advice to anyone who has run into this situation: download “Lookout Ad Network Detector”. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lookout.addetector

It’s a free app on the Play store, and it will tell you what advertising technique is used by each app on your phone. It does not constantly scan for apps that use intrusive ad techniques, but you can run a manual scan at any time and figure out what apps are using something like Airpush. And once you find the offending app, you can uninstall the detector if you wish.

In case you haven’t realized from the rest of this rant, I will NEVER put ads like this in my apps. Any practices that have driven me away from apps in the past will surely drive users away from my apps as well, and I don’t want that. I want to make some money off of my free apps, but there are a lot of user friendly ways to do it. Airpush is not in that list.