Ads in Paid Apps: the Tapatalk fiasco

Something which I awoke to today was the news that one of the apps I use on a semi-regular basis, Quoord System’s Tapatalk Forum App was now embedding ads within their paid-only app. I was, along with a host of others, utterly outraged by this discovery and took to Google Play in disgust over this unwelcomed addition to change my review for this app, which over the last few months, its devs have tried to win over users who’d been having issues with updates and new features, myself included.

Without doubt, the most irritating aspect of these ads compared to most ads on free apps is that the ads are displayed as threads within a forum, not typically as obvious as other ads which are either placed at the bottom or top of the app. This makes it easy for almost anyone to be led astray with an accidental tap on a thread they assume to be legitimate, if they don’t notice the small blue sticker at the bottom right edge of the thread – often where one’s thumb may scroll over.

Ads be ads, nobody likes them, nobody wants them

The main issue with Quoord as of the last few months is that they’ve been way too greedy and overzealous with users’ wallets, charging for simple add-ons such as themes – which have been made available free later on (see Aquamarine theme), and for users who were gullible enough to purchase the entire in-app theme pack (namely myself), some of us have suffered the annoyance of not having our themes available across our entire range of devices. You’d expect with a Tapatalk ID, that there’d be something within one’s data that would be able to see that a user has paid an exorbitant amount of dough for something purely cosmetic, and that it should be linked to every device that Tapatalk ID is associated with, but that’s not the case and my Nexus One (my current phone of choice) is left out.

I'll give it to Quoord on one thing, their devs are extremely responsive and for the most part, want to help their users get the most out their app. While at the time I was encountering issues with making purchased themes available on my other devices, Quoord couldn’t offer a refund (which was annoying), they did their best to assist and by sheer luck, I managed to figure out a workaround myself – which no longer works with my N1. However, recently it appears that Quoord are in complete denial over the ads debacle, and instead are pinning the blame on forum administrators who supposedly have ads enabled on their side.

From further investigation, one of XDA’s admins js1999 believes an auto opt-in option to display ads on forums was set as default by Tapatalk, and that it was the forum owner’s responsibility to uncheck this option. Regardless, the option should have been set as unchecked by default, and any blame on Quoord that js1999 wishes to be diverted because of this should in no way be the case, as js1999 and RootzWiki founder b16  have both assured their members that their sites have not received any compensation for any ads which have made their way onto the app. This muck-up was Quoord’s fault without question – they deliberately set an ad option for a paid app which in just about anyone’s books is a clear no-no.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Who's in the wrong here?