In the latest chapter of Yahoo’s fall from grace, the once-prominent internet company has been relegated to the role of bloatware on millions of Android phones, thanks to a new advertising agreement between Verizon and Samsung.
According to Reuters, the deal will load up Verizon Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ devices with a number of useless apps, including Yahoo Sports; Yahoo Finance; Go90, a mobile video service that you are almost certainly not using; and Oath Newsroom, a news curation app that surfaces headlines from across the web, but primarily from Yahoo News and HuffPost, both of which are owned by Verizon. As part of the deal, Oath will become the “premiere content partner” for Bixby, Samsung’s first-party virtual assistant. If that doesn’t sound like enough stuff that you don’t want on your phone, Samsung and Oath will also allow advertisers to place “native ads”—ads disguised as actual content—smack dab in the middle of the news feed.