latest
It looks like Pulse SMS has been bought by Maple Media — get ready for intrusive ads?
Memories of Cheetah Mobile come to mind
Read update
If the name Maple Media doesn't ring a bell, it might be time to put the Californian company on your watchlist. Over the past few years, the startup has purchased many popular Indie Android apps like the podcast player Player FM, the photo collage maker Pic Stitch, and a whole bunch of games.
Antutu benchmark applications vanish from Play Store (Update: Antutu responds)
The removals might be part of the larger crackdown on Cheetah Mobile apps
Read update
Antutu is one of the most popular benchmarking applications for Android, giving phone and tablet owners an easy way to compare their performance across devices. However, all three Antutu benchmarks have been removed from the Play Store, possibly as part of the larger crackdown on apps from infamous developer Cheetah Mobile.
Read update
Cheetah Mobile has earned a reputation as a dishonest, destructive Android development studio that occasionally buys up successful apps and turns them into data-collecting, IAP-infested cash machines. The company has also clashed with Play Store policies more than once, but it always managed to find its way back onto the platform. It looks like Google got tired of this game and seems to have decided to ban the developer's products.
Mobile app empire Cheetah Mobile not only makes terrible software, but has even found its products ejected from the Play Store on occasion for breaking rules. If you somehow need more reasons not to use apps from the company, one developer has discovered that some applications, including CM Launcher, store data in an unsecured cloud storage bucket.
There's always a sense of concern when a popular app is sold off to a new owner. Sometimes everything goes well, but it's not uncommon for new ownership to lead to more aggressive advertising or other problems. QuickPic was a popular photo gallery app years ago, and it has returned to the Play Store — in worse shape than ever.
The Cheetah Mobile story is the gift that keeps on giving. There can't be a few months of break between incidents, scandals, or even weird news involving the company, and today is no different. We just spotted that two of Cheetah's applications are now masquerading under a new developer name: Leopard Mobile. Yup, sounds legit.
For many years, QuickPic was the darling photo gallery app of many. It was small, fast, efficient, and free — a rare combination of features. Then in 2015, QuickPic was bought by Cheetah Mobile and, despite many assurances that the app wouldn't be monetized with ads, those of us who had followed Cheetah over the years could guess that something was up. Now, following a huge Cheetah debacle last month, QuickPic has disappeared from the Play Store. If this isn't indication enough that things are iffy, I don't know what is.
Read update
If you were, for some reason, hoping to download CM File Manager or Kika Keyboard, I have some bad news. A report last week claimed that Cheetah Mobile and an associated company called Kika Tech were engaged in some shady advertising practices, and now Google has responded. These two apps have been suspended from the Play Store, and Google may still take further action.
Read update
- Cheetah Mobile has issued a new statement in regards to these allegations. In it, the company both claims impotency as to being technically able to carry out the fraud as described, and further refutes that advertising income sourced through its internal SDK is a major source of revenue.
I know this is going to be shocking, but Cheetah Mobile may be involved in some very shady dealings. According to app analytics firm Kochava, Cheetah Mobile and an associated company called Kika Tech are using extensive permissions in their Android apps to fraudulently claim commissions for app installs from advertisers. The eight apps detected by Kochava have more than 2 billion downloads in the Play Store and around 700 million active users.
Everyone's favorite developer, Cheetah Mobile, has published many apps with tens of millions of downloads. Some have even hit 100 million. 500 million, however, is a challenge for any company, but Cheetah Mobile has cheated the odds and hit 500 million downloads on Security Master, its second app to do so.
The original Badland was a beautiful adventure game with interesting physics, gorgeous graphics, immersive soundtrack, and enough charm to land it on my personal list of 15 hauntingly beautiful dark and atmospheric games. The game was done so well that we forgave its late arrival on Android compared to iOS, applauded it for implementing cloud save and immersive mode for gameplay, and even lauded its implementation of free to play. This is a direct quote from Ryan's review of Badland:
Look, it's not as if we at Android Police are fanatically opposed to Cheetah Mobile as a company. I can see how one could get that impression from reading the previous Cheetah stories, I really can. But between screwing up an otherwise anticipated game sequel with in-app purchases, screwing up a perfectly good ASUS phone with bloatware, or screwing up future generations of developers with bloatware classes, it's hard not to see them as the cackling cartoon villains of the Android software world. The company's latest acquisition is a French news aggregator call News Republic.
We're about as shocked as you are on this - apparently the developer of the hugely popular game Badland has released the also-hugely-popular sequel, Badland 2, for Android. The problem? Indie dev Frogmind isn't the publisher: Clean Master Games, aka Cheetah Mobile, is. This is troubling for several reasons. And before you ask: yes, this is almost certainly legit. The game has a Frogmind / Clean Master intro splash, Clean Master Games is responding to user complaints in the reviews on the Play Store, and Cheetah Mobile's team is even chasing down cracked versions of the game already. (Let alone that even Cheetah Mobile would be extremely unlikely to stoop so low as blatant trademark and copyright theft of a famous game.)
Cheetah Mobile, perhaps the least respected large-scale developer of mobile apps, is partnering with the truly world-class computer science and engineering programs at Carnegie Mellon University to show them how the pros shove ads into everything. Yep, this is not a drill, Cheetah Mobile is in fact teaching a course in mobile advertising at CMU's Silicon Valley campus to students paying over $40,000 per year in tuition to get graduate degrees in software development and related fields.
I'm pretty sure something was lost in translation between the different reviews of ASUS' more recent generations of phones and the company's software development team. Everyone has lamented the high customization of ZenUI, the software layer that ASUS has slapped on top of Android, and its endless list of pre-installed and useless apps. On our own team, different writers unanimously pointed to the software as the major drawback for the Zenfone 2, Zenfone 2E, Zenpad S 8.0, Zenfone Selfie, and Zenfone 2 Laser. So what's ASUS to do to fix that?
Read the title. Now read it again. Yes, itshappening.gif and you better be ready for it. The CheetahPhone is officially a thing.
The saga of once-beloved gallery app QuickPic continues as Cheetah Mobile asserts its control over the app. QuickPic is getting its first major update since the acquisition, and it's tempting you with free storage. You want that free storage? Just sign up. What could go wrong?
The Android faithful nearly started a riot on the internet last week when the Play Store listing for QuickPic suddenly came under the control of Cheetah Mobile. Now the developer of QuickPic, Nanling Zheng has posted a rundown of the situation on Google+. He says the entire QuickPic team has joined Cheetah Mobile, and you have nothing to worry about. But do you?
QuickPic is a nice little Android photo gallery-slash-viewer. Over several years it has gained a comfortable userbase thanks to steady updates, excellent communication with users, plenty of extra features, and an impressive adherence to Android design standards. So when QuickPic fans discovered that the app had been sold and re-published by Cheetah Mobile, they were, to put it mildly, pissed. They began flooding the app's Play Store page under the new developer "Cheetah Mobile Cloud (NYSE:CMCM)" with disparaging reviews almost immediately.