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arXiv · 2609.17316

Can We Stop The Ads? Taxonomy and Characterization of Smartphone Splash Ads and Existing Countermeasures

Shuhao Zhang·Xinyu Liu·Ziyu Shao·Yuqing Yang·Yan Long
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Abstract

Splash ads are full-screen advertisements that pop up and appear as the first interaction page when users start an app, often tricking users into unknowingly activating certain trigger mechanisms, such as moving the phone to redirect users to other profit-driven third parties. So far, splash ads have already caused significant real-world impacts, ranging from significantly delaying emergency response to distracting drivers, as well as degrading accessibility of apps to vision-impaired users. We analyze 108 documented implementations of advertising defenses to examine their applicability to splash ads and the requirements users face when deploying them. Our analysis identifies substantial deployment barriers, including device rooting or jailbreaking, runtime code injection, and application modification. Options without these requirements can still involve additional permissions, rule maintenance, source compilation, or payment. In our evaluation of 13 configurations of 11 tools across 10 popular apps, only one tool prevented the target ad-triggered navigation across all ten apps. It required Accessibility permission, and ads remained visible for approximately one second before dismissal. Other tested configurations failed to prevent navigation or, in some cases, left host apps unable to launch or stuck on the ad page. We further analyze the outstanding challenges and pos- sible future directions, highlighting the urgent need to incentivize smartphone manufacturers to provide more friendly and regulated platforms.

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Shuhao Zhang, Xinyu Liu, Ziyu Shao, Yuqing Yang, Yan Long. 2026-09-15. Can We Stop The Ads? Taxonomy and Characterization of Smartphone Splash Ads and Existing Countermeasures. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17316

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