If you have used a Micromax handset before you might be well aware of the Bloat ware apps that almost every handset comes pre-installed with. And now there are reports about Micromax is remotely installing some apps without user permission.
Some Micromax users have reported that apps were installed on their Micromax devices without their permission and the frequency of ads have increased, they have even found ads showing up in the notification bar.
After some users reported about the abnormality on their handset XDA developers further investigated and found that Micromax is using a 3rd party firmware OTA service called Adups (FWupgrade.apk), instead of the default Google’s firmware OTA service. Now this 3rd party app does not really update the firmware, but actually installs unwanted apps.
XDA Developers further confirmed that the apps were indeed installing on users mobile phone without their permission and to avoid the permission popup the app was installing it via command line access.
It seems the main objective of the apps that were installed without users permission was to make money, once the apps were installed users would start seeing more ads. However there is a huge possibility that users data might also be collected / sent, and if this be the case, what is being sent and what information is collected is not known.
You can check more about this on XDA Developer forum, they also have a temporary solution for this i.e. rooting the device and disabling that software update application.
There was a news about coolpad android devices on theregister website – security experts found backdoor on devices sold by coolpad they pushed ake over-the-air (OTA) update that does nothing but instead installs unwanted applications – now most of the Micromax handsets are in fact re-branded Coolpad.