Is Micromax Installing Apps Maliciously? ADUPS Clarifies.

The largest smartphone maker in India- Micromax is in for a fresh round of criticism in the country. It is now being blamed for installing apps on phones without even asking for permissions.

This problem surfaced a few days back when a Reditt user redddc25 shared what’s happening on his Micromax Canvas Fire A093. He had claimed that his phone kept on installing some unwanted apps without even asking him. He uninstalled them a couple of times but they kept on surfacing again and again. But when he shared his quandary on Reditt, he found that he was not alone. Many other Reditt users confirmed that they too had been facing the same issue.

This news spread like wildfire and many techies on xda-developers started giving their suggestions ranging from turning off background mobile data to rooting the phone for safeguarding the privacy, etc.

One developer found out that these apps were in fact installed via FWUpgrade.apk package. This is a firmware upgrade app specializing providing in FOTA updates.

Micromax hasn’t specified as to why it replaced Google OTA Service app with this third-party app.

This app is developed by a Chinese company ADUPS which has denied anything to do with this.

Users are speculating that Micromax might be doing this for boosting their revenue. Because the apps that are getting installed are flooding the phone with a lot of ads and promotional notifications. It is also suspected that these apps might be sending the precious user data to their servers and thus voiding the fundamental right of user privacy.

ADUPS Denies any role in this

The Chinese company which handles FOTA updates for Micromax phones has denied having anything to do with installing apps without asking for user permissions.

ADUPS has started an investigation along with Micromax to take a deep look into the matter. Here is all that ADUPS mentioned in its clarification:

ADUPS Technology is the leader in FOTA technology and the best professional FOTA service provider in the world. More than 60% smart device manufacturers have adopted ADUPS FOTA so far.

Our customers trust us can provide a high-quality FOTA solution to them to continue to develop high-performing and sophisticated smart devices for their end-users around the global.

We have helped our vendors to release a mass of updates in the past three years. Even so, we have never received any complaints from our customers and end-users for any bad service.

ADUPS will never do any operations unrelated with updates without knowing of our customers and their end-users.

About remotely installing unwanted apps and AD push on Micromax phones, we began at once to investigate the case with Micromax. We have suspected some competitors slandered us behind our back and we will detect the truth by pursuing legal claims. Those guys released network of rumor must be responsible for this event and all losses. We have got the sample device and some snapshots about this event, we will submit another statement about this after we analysis the applications integrated before and trace the system logs.

I certainly don’t believe that a company as big as Micromax will do anything like this for boosting their revenue. They would simply launch new and expensive phones if boosting the revenue was their only moto. Why mess with the user privacy and hijack phones? Let’s hope that both these companies will work on the issue round the clock and do the needful.

Micromax, some clarification from your side would be great.

What are your thoughts about this? Do you think that any big smartphone maker would something like this?