[Android Software/Hacking General [Developers Only]] OstrichSak:
A while back I installed this game on the advice of a buddy. What a fun game it ended up being. Then, some time after installing I had a random folder in my gallery with images from the movie Thor. After some digging I found it in a folder called millenniamedia and promptly deleted both of them. I didn't give it much thought because I thought maybe I accidentally downloaded it somehow while browsing although that doesn't seem like a mistake I would make. Then a short while later I notice not only is it back but I now have another folder with advertising crap from the TV show Sons of Guns. Now I know something is up and I narrowed it down to most likely being the app WwF since I don't have a lot of games installed nor to I play them very often but this was the latest one installed plus the most often I played a game. I deleted those only to find another one with Winnie the Pooh installed a while later. I wanted to get to the bottom of this because this IMO is some awfully shady marketing and if you want to have ads in the game (which it does) then fine, that's understandable to bring a free product to users. Even those can be overly obtrusive and make people to not want install/use their apps. To me there's a thin line and whoever has done this has crossed the line.

To get to the bottom of this I Googled millennialmedia and came across this website discussing how to install the advertising into applications. I then took the apk of WwF from my /data/app folder and copied it to my PC to be able to poke around in it. I renamed the .apk file to a .rar and unzipped it to examine the files. After doing so I did a search for the MMAdView.jar file mentioned in the MM website and wouldn't ya know it... there it was! It was a file found in \res\values called: attrs.xml and had the following text:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

- <resources>

- <declare-styleable name="MMAdView">

<attr name="apid" format="string" />

<attr name="acid" format="string" />

<attr name="adType" format="string" />

<attr name="refreshInterval" format="integer" />

<attr name="accelerate" format="string" />

<attr name="ignoreDensityScaling" format="string" />

<attr name="age" format="string" />

<attr name="gender" format="string" />

<attr name="zip" format="string" />

<attr name="income" format="string" />

<attr name="keywords" format="string" />

<attr name="ethnicity" format="string" />

<attr name="orientation" format="string" />

<attr name="marital" format="string" />

<attr name="children" format="string" />

<attr name="education" format="string" />

<attr name="politics" format="string" />

<attr name="goalId" format="string" />

</declare-styleable>

</resources>

Right near the top. So I think it's safe to say that Words with Friends is the culprit and Zynga has made my boycott list as a result. I encourage everyone to do the same and spread the word because this sort of pervasive marketing should NOT be accepted by the end users. Keep in mind that devs will do whatever WE allow them to get away with. I used to love Angry Birds by Rovio until they blindsided users with updates that included pop-up video w/loud audio that is not only intrusive but even caused some devices to crash losing game progress.

I pay for some apps and I don't pay for others. Not paying for an app doesn't mean that I want to relinquish all control of my device to an application developer and it's awfully arrogant of these unscrupulous developers to take it upon themselves to do so and I'm sure there are good devs out there that agree with me and feel this is something that gives a black eye to the entire dev community. If making money is the most important thing to you and you can't find a way to make some money with standard advertising then you need to find something else to do.

I feel awful that several people installed this game after my recommendation and now have all sorts of garbage in their gallery they didn't put there and I shouldn't have these kinds of feelings about suggesting a friggin Android video game app.