A reddit user reports that 8-10 ads are displayed at once and upon looking up the responsible app for these disturbing notifications, he was presented with a system app called “Software Update”. In addition to downloading apps, these device also seem to display ads in the notification bar from time to time. While these practices already sound terribly wrong on their own, it unfortunately doesn’t end there.

The downloads also happen when using a mobile network, so your expensive full-speed data will reduce significantly if your phone is constantly trying to download apps you don’t even want to have.

Micromax devices don’t tend to be the highest end you can find, so storage space is still considered a luxury (at 4GB total) and having the device’s storage filled up with random apps is certainly not the best use of that precious space.

Having no control over which apps are installed on your device poses a huge security risk, as you don’t get to check the permissions of the apps and you have no idea if these apps are indeed the original apps (or potentially modified in a malicious way).

Obviously, this is wrong on so many levels, but I’d like to point out a few key problems here anyway: It appears that even uninstalling these apps won’t help, as shortly after, they will simply re-appear again. Today, however, reports are coming in that users of certain devices by Indian phone manufacturer Micromax noticed apps being silently installed without their consent or permission. We also heard about manufacturers and carriers adding tracing software to their devices, in order to collect data about how the device performs, statistics about voice and data connectivity between the device and radio towers, or even battery runtime data ( CarrierIQ are you listening?). In the recent past, we witnessed quite a few acts of OEMs messing with devices to achieve various goals, such as increasing benchmark results.

Micromax a37 software update