Avast in program ADs - These are a fact of the free version, but can be removed in paid versions of Avast - AvastUI > Menu > Settings > General - Personal Privacy and you can uncheck them, ‘Show offers for other Avast Products’ and ‘Show offers for 3rd party products’.
It is not completely true that having a paid version of Avast will stop Avast from spamming you. I have paid Avast One and still get lots of annoying spammy popups and messages from Avast.
One example: On my Samsung S22 Avast One is persistently putting the completely useless and unnecessary pop up stating the “Avast has you covered 24/7”. I have tried unchecking all items in notifications. (Which I don’t want to do as a few of those are actually helpful.) Also opted out of all improvements and offers in the privacy tab. Nothing I can find turns off this annoying Avast self-promotion that is always taking up space in notifications and at the top of my screen. I can dismiss it manually, which I do 10, 15, 20 or more times a day, but it comes back. I am ready to remove Avast from my phone because of this intrusive popup that cannot be turned off. There are also Avast messages that popup on my Windows 11 computer. Granted these are not trying to upsell me, but they are spam, they are annoying and intrusive, and it appears Avast does not let you turn them off.
My belief and my response was based on the Windows Product and not the Android Avast Mobile Security.
I only use the free version of Avast Mobile Security for android and surprisingly see very few .
If one combines it with the use of Blokada5 app (downloadable from Aptoide)
a clean experience can be guaranteed. Also with Avast Secure Browser for Android.
I also use Avast One on my Windows 11 computer. There I do also get pop-up notifications telling me how well Avast is doing its job. I just close them without much thought as on the computer with a mouse, it is a quick and easy dismissal. On my phone with Avast one my main complaint is the notification that Avast One keeps giving me, and sticking at the top of my screen in the notification area that “Avast has you covered 24/7”. Beyond just being annoying to have to open the notifications and then close that one, it also keeps coming back. So, Avast is telling me a dozen times a day that it is doing what I paid for and installed it to do. It really is a dumb and useless notification and Avast should at least provide a way for paying customers to avoid these.
These days I am not really seeing upselling attempts as much as just Avast developers giving themselves pats on the back and constantly telling you what a great job their software is doing. I prefer products to just work silently in the background and only interrupt me if there really is something I need to attend to. I don’t need to be constantly interrupted just so they can tell me how wonderful Avast is.
But having said all that, I am still using Avast after at least 12 years so that says something about what I think of the other products I have tried.
I have never used the Avast One product, I didn’t like the interface when introduced and the limited configuration. Whilst there were more components in Avast One I didn’t feel I needed them.
So I stuck with the Avast Antivirus Free product.
My reason for switching to Avast in the first place was its configurability and that almost 20 years ago.