Avast: Do the ads stop if I buy it?

Avast Mac Security
1

Advertising really harshes my mellow. Like, I’ll be in a good mood and then Avast Free Antivirus splats a pop up on my screen. Then I get annoyed because I crawl through the settings and there’s nothing to make that go away. Then I start feeling horribly bitter about Avast.

If I pay for Avast AntiVirus, does that mean I never ever ever see another Avast advertising pop up again? Is that part of the deal, or do they keep spamming me to buy their other products too?

2

Hi mcgroarty,
Would you mind to help me understand the issue with the advertising before you buy it? I’d love to say - “buy now and all advertising is gone”. But it seems that there is something going terribly wrong with your installation.

Would you mind to share screenshots of the mentioned advertising, or at least some log of what advertisement and when appeared?

Thank you for sharing your experience with us to help us to make the product better!
Lukas

3

Here’s an example:

https://i.imgur.com/A8FYivs.png

Clicking “Resolve” brings up a pitch for Avast’s cleanup software. I don’t want to buy or use that, and I’d never want that pop up again.

4

This message is setup to appear once a 30 days if there is lot of clutter to clean.
Does it appear more frequently?

5

It is also designed to sell Avast’s CleanUp program. :slight_smile:

6

Doesn’t Avast classify some other software with unexpected pop-up ads as PUAs and warn the user before installing?

I haven’t kept track of how often Avast’s advertisement pops up, but even once per install would be too often once a user pays for Avast. It’s an advertisement. That means it’s designed to make the user itchy and acquisitive. Some people’s reactions to this will range from insult to moral objection. We don’t want it in a paid product for the same reason that we buy TV shows on iTunes instead of watching them on cable.

The product it advertises is also snake oil in part, or at least it gives misleading advice. Blasting log files will affect people’s experiences when they need to troubleshoot or work with Apple support. But, much worse, wiping out ~/Library/Caches is counterproductive on a machine with plenty of free storage and an SSD. Fragmentation or seek times aren’t an issue. Space isn’t an issue. Why would one aggressively purge data that one then has to wait to download again? Why should a user slow down his computer just to make his drive’s free space temporarily look larger, even if he hadn’t been tricked into paying for that privilege?

7

But that’s mixing apples and oranges. We detect PUAs with an Alert (Threat detected) popup. This popup doesn’t and will not offer anything. PUAs (aka Potentially Unwanted Applications) might be an issue to user computer. If you don’t like this approach then feel free to turn it off in Preferences. However you’ll have to do it for Web and File shield separately. Look for “PUP” (aka Potentially Unwanted Programs).

I haven't kept track of how often Avast's advertisement pops up, but even once per install would be too often once a user pays for Avast. It's an advertisement. That means it's designed to make the user itchy and acquisitive. Some people's reactions to this will range from insult to moral objection. We don't want it in a paid product for the same reason that we buy TV shows on iTunes instead of watching them on cable.

The product it advertises is also snake oil in part, or at least it gives misleading advice. Blasting log files will affect people’s experiences when they need to troubleshoot or work with Apple support. But, much worse, wiping out ~/Library/Caches is counterproductive on a machine with plenty of free storage and an SSD. Fragmentation or seek times aren’t an issue. Space isn’t an issue. Why would one aggressively purge data that one then has to wait to download again? Why should a user slow down his computer just to make his drive’s free space temporarily look larger, even if he hadn’t been tricked into paying for that privilege?


I don’t agree that the Avast Cleanup is a snake oil. It does its job perfectly. We’ve started with introducing features focused on making sure that there is enough space on your hard drive. There is quite a lot of Macbooks with a small SSD. Removing some GB of unnecessary clutter helps to improve the performance a bit. You’d be surprised how many logs and caches are left on your HDD by many products. You can delete those directories manually one by one or use our tool. We don’t delete caches of running program as it may cause some unexpected crashes. To make it short we are doing our best to do it right.
We plan to add many features in next releases as well to make the Cleanup more powerfull.

8

Lukas,

I believe the original poster is asking if there is an option to disable these pop-ups if you purchase the product. I know in the Windows release there is such a setting, but haven’t purchased the Mac version to check if such an option exists.

Mac

9

@Mac, you could try the beta without having to purchase another product. :slight_smile:
I can’t, don’t own a Mac.

10

There is no such option now - but we are adding it. It should be available in next version.

11

I would like to add that even when you do purchase Avast CleanUp, Avast itself still shows these ads. There should also be a mechanism to check if it’s installed (I preferred when Avast products were in all in the same UI box and is probably why this regression occurred). There was a time that Avast knew you purchased the product and stopped advertising it. It does the same thing for VPN (yet another product I own). I mean really it’s ridiculous. I get the free version having some ads (and should be with a disable option in a dialog box in General settings) because it helps the company make profit. But paid versions should have no ads whatsoever. That’s part of the point of a paid version.

12

WSLUser, it should not be happening. If you have AV Pro; or if you have Free AV and Cleanup then the popup with the promotion of Cleanup should not appear at all. I’d love to hear more info about it as it seems there is some bug in product or issue in setup of the ads.

13

Yes. This is all that I’m after. I don’t want to buy Avast Antivirus if I still get advertisements, even if they are advertisements for other Avast branded products.

Some other software, such as Kaspersky, still shows advertisements for other Kaspersky software in the paid version. But paid users have an option in preferences that disables these promotions. I wouldn’t even mind if that option defaulted to showing these ads and I had to explicitly toggle the option.

14

When the possibillity to remove these popups will be available?

15

As soon as you purchase a paid product.

16

Are you saying it’s available now in the paid product? In an earlier post above, an Avast employee said it wasn’t yet available.

17

Why not install a trial of the latest version and see. If it’s not what you want, delete it.
Make sure you don’t allow auto renewal.