Dear Samsung, please stop ruining your best gadgets with horrible ads

Advertisements are a known consequence of online life in 2025. When you watch a YouTube video, scroll through social media, or open an article like this one you’re reading right now, it’s normal and expected to see ads. Some advertising is more aggressive than others, but you know what you’re getting into when you use any facet of the modern internet.

However, there are other times when ads appear in unexpected places. These could be ads in the digital wallet app on your smartphone, ads on the home page for your smart TV, or even ads on your internet-connected fridge.

These are all places Samsung has found it appropriate to include advertisements on its products, and it’s a maddening pattern that needs to stop.

Advertisements on Samsung products take many different forms, and one of the most annoying is how ads are sprawled across Samsung smartphones.

This isn’t something we really see on phones from other brands like Google or OnePlus, but it’s a side effect we’ve come to accept on Samsung phones. And even if you can turn these ads off, the fact that they exist in the first place is ridiculous.

And it’s not just notifications. I booted up my Galaxy S25 while writing this article, and in less than a minute, I came across three more blatant forms of advertising.

Upon opening Samsung Wallet, I was met with a full-screen advertisement for Samsung Wallet’s 10th anniversary sweepstakes (featuring horribly low-quality graphics). Once I got past that, the Samsung Wallet home page was riddled with cash back ads for Temu, Chewy, Sam’s Club, and more. Shortly after opening the Galaxy Store app, I was served a pop-up ad for Glance AI —an app that places ads and other content right on your lock screen.

Mind you, these aren’t advertisements I’m seeing on a third-party website or application; they’re all coming directly from Samsung itself — on a phone that starts at $800. And it’s the same experience even if you have the $1,300 Galaxy S25 Ultra or $2,000 Galaxy Z Fold 7. No matter how much money you spend on a Samsung phone, Samsung is still going to shove ads in your face. And no, it doesn’t feel good at all.

This same philosophy applies to other Samsung products, too. Samsung’s smart TVs have become notoriously bad about this. There’s no shortage of people complaining on Reddit about advertisements appearing on the home screen of their $2,000+ Samsung television. Not ads during expected ad-breaks on another streaming app — ads baked into the system UI.

More importantly, this applies to Samsung smart fridges that start at around $1,800 and can cost as much as $3,500. To spend that much money on a smart fridge and have to see ads on it is an unbelievable scenario to think about.

If the smart fridge thing were its own, isolated incident, I would be hopeful that enough feedback might encourage Samsung to rethink this decision and possibly walk back its planned advertising rollout.

However, as it’s been evident from Samsung phones and TVs over the last few years, the chances of that happening are slim to none. Samsung is a company that loves showing ads to its customers, and no matter how much complaining happens, the ads don’t go away. While they’re almost certainly a good money-maker for Samsung, they’re also a surefire way to make the company’s products feel cheap and low-quality.

That said, there is another way to look at all of this. Does a notification about an upcoming new Samsung phone really ruin your current phone? Does an ad on your home screen completely tarnish your smart TV? Does an ad on your smart fridge screen — a screen you aren’t always looking at — make it obsolete?

You could very easily say “No” to all of those questions, and if we’re being honest with ourselves, that would be the correct answer. But even if built-in advertisements don’t outright make these gadgets unusable, you still shouldn’t have to put up with them — especially on phones that cost $1,000, TVs that cost $2,000, and fridges that can cost over $3,000.

Samsung could earn a lot of goodwill by simply flipping the switch on its advertising strategy, and a small part of me is holding out for hope that could still happen. But as someone who’s spent enough time in this industry, I also know how incredibly unlikely that is.

So, Samsung, if you’re listening, this is my formal request: please ease it up with the ads. You make good gadgets that are already expensive enough, and we shouldn’t have to keep paying the price by you turning those gadgets into expensive billboards. Enough is enough.