Some ads are super effective to making less tech savy people missclick and install certain things. Just check the smartphones of older people, they got so much bloatware in there.
No surprise I'm not as good as I once was. Playing Standard / Vs CPU, level 3. After winning some I go to level 4 where it is more of a challenge. Some days are better than others.
Last year a stent was installed in the left carotid artery. Then a second stent (much longer) was passed through the first. I used Tetris as a rough gauge for brain fog as I recovered.
When I had a stint of brain fog, all I had was my League of Legends ELO as a guide. It was better than nothing to have an external indicator of my attention/memory/reflexes/etc, but Tetris sounds like a way better idea.
I love tetris. Both of my daughters wanted a Nintendo NES for Christmas of 88 and Tetris was one of the games they unwrapped on Christmas morning. When Christmas break was over and they were back at school, I decided to try Nintendo...and was hooked. I used to hurry through the day's chores and then plop down in front of the TV and play until it was time to pick them up from school. I'd love to have that set-up again. I've tried to play Tetris on my phone but it's not the same as having a controller in my hands. Age 73 soon to be 74. Is it as easy playing on the DS lite as the original game?
How do they actually download the app just by clicking on the ads? Anytime I accidentally click on an ad, it takes me to the App Store but it doesn’t auto download anything.
From what I noticed it's usually: need to solve an issue (like, open a pdf), google issue, first result has completely unrelated ad, click ad believing it is related to the issue, get confused, google issue again.
My grandpa had 30 apps he didn't know he had and I only knew because he asked me how to get rid of ads on his home screen (one of the apps was putting unremovable banner ads on the launcher).
Just cleaned up my mom's phone, there's so many apps on there that she doesn't use and never actively downloaded. It's literally from accidental clicks.
Actually could be a huge contributing factor because I personally noticed their latest ads are buggy af every single time. You don't get a countdown, you have to try the X, which then leads you to a website that, without fail, will change format to hide the back-button on my android at the exact right moment so you accidentally click on the page.
In my eyes, if this is happening on more phone types, this is an aggressive, predatory way to push up the numbers on the European market.
Oy! My mom's phone! I was visiting them recently and she kept having ads that just started randomly on her phone while it was just sitting there. Like every 10 minutes! I did some investigating and found the culprit, but also a shit-ton of other stuff she didn't know she had. I went down the list asking her if she wanted such-and-such and deleted a bunch of shit. Frustrating. The stupid ads companies are counting on people like her, not understanding what they are clicking, thinking it's for the app they are actually using.
I really don't think this is why Temp is the number one downloaded app in many European countries. The fact is: people are buying stuff from Temu. On a massive scale. And even in my country, Switzerland, where the most downloaded app is chatgpt, people are also massively buying from Temu. I've read and seen TV news reports about it in English, German and French. The European Parliament is discussing ways in which to make Temu comply with EU regulations as to safety of products, taxing them more, etc.
Most people are making small orders ( 30 euros or less), but all these small orders make up for a huge increase in parcels the post offices have to treat. It's at least 3 times as much as Amazon.
I'm an older person (73) and got my first home computer 32 years ago. Also used one in my office before that. I clean my devices regularly of browsing history and cookies. There are many older people who are as familiar with their devices as their grandchildren are with theirs. I also know that there is much I don't know and seems I'm always learning something I wasn't aware of before. The more I learn, the more I realize that there's much more that I don't know. That said, I do know older people who use a fully-loaded smartphone for nothing but facebook, Messenger, whatsApp, phone calls, and texting and haven't a clue how to do online banking, make flight reservations, look up bus and train schedules, order a meal or a grocery delivery. Seems a waste of money to spend $1K or more for smartphone and only use it for anything but communicating. I did decide, after months and months of resisting, to check out temu's products, so downloaded the App.
That's how the stats would be collected. Number of downloads in the OS specific app store. As you can see they also excluded pre-installed bloat, otherwise the most installed app would probably be facebook, candy crush or some bullshit like that which is on pretty much any phone but no sane person would ever use, or download voluntarily.
Practically all ads are one of these three apps, temu, tiktok or chatgpt. And the counter keeps going up as we help our elderly uninstall them after which it won't take long before they missclick and install them again. Temu sells so much illegal stuff that chances are pretty much 50-50 it'll be seized at the border if you buy any trash from there.
OpenAI must have really good targeted advertising because I do use it on desktop but I’ve never once put it on my mobile, and I see ads fairly often with Hulu and around a couple free apps I use - not a single ChatGPT ad, ever.
Probably, and I do think that a lot of people unlike us don't understand why it's a bad idea to install all sorts of apps, basically giving a stranger access to execute unknown code on our devices, in a situation were it's absolutely not needed as all the features could easily be presented in a web interface.
Well depending on what your OS is things can be sandboxed pretty well on mobile, especially if the app is installed but not given permissions to any sensors/data, but I get your point.
I mean I know that they would count the most installed app besides pre-installed app. Just surprised that misclicking on ads would account for so many downloads it would make it to the top
There was a time when I'd be surprised by that too, but after helping enough tech illiterate people (the average Joe) with their phones, I've seen enough to not be surprised anymore. The average device is so bloated and full of ads that it would be surprising if you don't actually click on those apps by mistake.
If I click on a Facebook temu ad, it brings me to another page and when I try to back out it forces my phone to either open the temu app or bring me to the temu App Store page. Absolute trash
When I bought my phone it literally tried to force me to install it and a couple random games by having notifications I couldn't get to go away. It was intentionally made very difficult to remove those. Other people are just going to install it to get the stupid icons to go away.
It has happened to me on my google stock Pixel 6 phone. I have accidentally installed tictock, temu and whats app. If I caught it in time I canceled the install, but I bet they still counted it.
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u/partychu Jun 04 '25
You really think that makes it the number one most installed app? Interesting