Published in: India

Ever since I added the Reliance Jio 4G SIM on my Android phone, I’ve been bombarded with fullscreen overlay ads. The ads appear intermittently but they’ll almost always show up after you disconnect a phone call or when you are charging the device.

I use a limited number of Android apps from known developers and was fairly certain that adware was related to the Jio phone service. After fiddling with every possible setting inside Android to disable the ads, I turned to Twitter for help.

You can read the entire Twitter thread or here’s a quickly summary:

Uninstall MyJio, Jio 4G Voice and all other Jio apps. Revoke all permissions of Jio apps. Long press the app icon, press the info button, go to App Permission and uncheck everything. Also turn off the “draw over the apps” permission for Jio apps. For Android Oreo or later, go to Settings > Apps > MyJio and turn off the “App can appear on top” setting. You probably need to do this for every Jio app on the device. Root the phone and install AdAway, an ad block that uses the hosts file to block specific hostnames and IP addresses. Use Greenify to hibernate all the Jio apps and prevent the app from running in the background. Disable ‘Telephone’ access for all Jio apps. Even Jio Mags has default access to ‘Telephone’! Toggle background data to disable data access for all Jio related apps.

Unfortunately, none of these suggestions worked.

Meanwhile, the Jio team contacted me after seeing the tweet and asked for the IMEI number of the phone. A week later, I got a call from the Jio support team saying that the problem should be resolved.

Yes, I was no longer getting any pop-up ads on my phone despite having all the Jio apps as before. What changed? It turned out, the Jio support representative told me, that these ads can only be disabled by Jio for the requested phone number on the server side.

In short, if you are also feeling annoyed with Jio related ads on your phone, send a tweet to @JioCare and they should be able to help. This also reminds me of Amazon - just ping their support team and they’ll happily remove ads from your Kindle.